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FALAISE 
The Town of the Conqueror 




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FALAISE 

The Town of the Conqueror 

By , 

Anna Bowman Dodd 

Author of 

*'In and Out of Three Normandy Inns," ** Cathedral Days," 

"On the Broads," '* Glorinda," etc. 



Illustrated 




Boston 
Little, Brown, and Company 



1900 



J- 

Library of Cooctresa 

Two Copies Received 
DEC 6 1900 

*i Copjrngnt entry 

SECONH COPY 

Oei»vM«!d to 

OKOeh OiVtSION 

DEC ISiQm I 



Copyright, igoOj 
By Anna Bowman Dodd. 



All rights renewed 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



^ 



DEDICATION 
EN SOUVENIR RECONNAISSANT 

A 

MONSIEUR LE CUR£ BERNARD 

CI-DEVANT abbe' DE NOTRE-DAME- 
DE-GUIBRAY 



PREFACE 

AS certain of the smaller Italian towns 
played each their part in that European 
phase of development we call the Renaissance, 
so in France some of its minor towns have 
been centres of great movements whose influ- 
ence has not been alone for France and French- 
men, but for the whole human race. 

For several centuries, in Falaise, feudalism 
and chivalry, English and French arms, Cathol- 
icism and Protestantism each in turn struggled 
for that supremacy which was to make or mar 
human progress. 

From the days when Romans made of Nor- 
mandy a delightful Roman province to the 
reign of the Great Napoleon, there has been 
no century in which Falaise has not contributed 
a brilliant or important chapter to French 
history. 



X PREFACE 

Lying somewhat apart from the high-roads 
of tourist travel, this interesting and beautiful 
town is but Httle known. 

Fully to write its history would be to write 
the histories of Normandy and of France. The 
present volume is an attempt merely to outline 
the town's earlier military importance, to trace 
its growth in commercial prosperity, and to 
describe the charm of its modern aspect. 

The treatment of " The Story of Arlette," in 
fictional form, in Part II., was suggested by the 
models furnished us in the older chroniclers, 
whose versions of the loves of Robert and 
Arlette agree chiefly in their preference for a 
fanciful rather than for the more conventional 
historical form. 

Versailles, July, 1900. 



CONTENTS 
liart I. 

TO THE FAIR AT FALAISE 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. An Inn Courtyard 3 

II. The Romance of the Road 13 

III. The Caen Plains . 22 

IV. Chateaux and Church Spires 30 

V. On the Road to Caen and Tours ... 37 

VI. Falaise. — Street Scenes ....... 47 

VII. To the Fair Grounds 56 

VIII. Horse-Trading 69 

IX. Women Vendors 80 

X. The Fair of Booths 89 

XL Some Night Scenes . . . .. . . . loi 

iart II. 

THE TALE OF A TOWN 

i. The Story of Arlette 11 1 

II. Robert the Magnificent 127 

III. The Young Duke Willia:m at Falaise . . 144 

IV. Willia^m's Capture of Falaise 154 

V. History of the Great Fair ..... 186 

VI. The Chateau de Falaise ...... 204 

VII. Falaise of our own Time 245 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Chateau of Falaise Frontispiece 

Page 

Some Peasant Critics 17 

Across the Caen Plains 23 

A small Chateau near Falaise 44 

Falaise 49 

The Square of St. Gervais 51 

A Street Scene 52 

The Apse of the Norman Church of Notre Dame de 

Guibray » 60 

The Horse-Fair . 61 

Some Buyers 70 

" This way, my friend " . 73 

A Sale of Donkeys 78 

Some Normandy Chars-a-bancs '^'j 

" By the Slice, Madame " 91 

A Scene at the Fair of Booths 96 

A Typical Norman 99 

William the Conqueror 109 

Place Guillaume le Conquerant, Falaise 149 

The Walls and Bastions of the Fortress 205 

The Fortress and Talbot Tower 217 

Street View, Falaise 243 

A House in the Valley 248 



xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

The Norman Church of St. Laurent 249 

The Corniche of D'Aubigny 251 

Valdante and Porte des Cordeliers 254 

Fontaine d'Arlette, Falaise 257 

A Chateau in Town 260 

Apse of Saint Gervais, Falaise 266 

The Church of Saint Gervais 267 

The Chateau of Versainville, near Falaise 272 

Sainte Trinite, Choir and Apse 275 

The Church of Sainte Trinite 277 



PART I 
TO THE FAIR AT FALAISE 



FALAISE: 

THE TOWN OF THE CONQUEROR 
CHAPTER I 

AN INN COURTYARD 

THE summer city of the blond beaches — ■ 
the city that stretches from beneath the 
cliffs of Etretat to the rock-perched cathedral 
of Mont St. Michel — was at its gayest revel 
of crowded promenades, casino balls, and villa 
and chateaux festivities. 

Nowhere along the bright coast was the 
scene of this yearly review of the fashions and 
of the invertebrate passions bred of them, set 
with greater effect than in the ornamental 
courtyard of the famous old inn, Guillaume le 
Conquerant. Centuries ago, kings and great 
ladies had passed beneath its arched doorway. 
Once more the life and fashion of its era was 
centred within the open courtyard. Like cer- 



4 FALAISE 

tain marvellous faces seated about the tables, 
the old inn with its new hangings, bright tiles, 
and modern bric-a-brac adornments, presented 
the aspect of a correctly restored, touched-up 
antiquity. Those who, only yesterday, had 
been dining under the trees of the Champs 
Elysees, and who now found themselves 
breakfasting under Normandy roofs, to such 
there could have been no startling sense of 
chano^e. 

Each little table was a centre of talk and 
laughter. Above the metallic clatter of well- 
plied forks and knives rose the gay rhythm of 
the purling French speech. Under the shade 
of the large umbrellas, the Faubourg St. 
Germain sat covertly watching the Chaussee 
d'Antin. The smart world of the Jockey Club, 
between courses, was busy booking its bets ; 
for, in an hour, the horses were to run at 
Caen, 

In open sheds and inner courtyards, coaches, 
automobiles, motor-cycles, bicycles, every ve- 
hicle warranted best to minister to the modern 
mania for rapid displacement — with these was 
every inch of available space crowded. Above 



AN INN COURTYARD 5 

the melodious murmur of voices, the grinding 
of wheels struck upon the ear — in harsh 
discord. The throb of panting engines, the 
shriek of released steam — such were the 
sounds that were turning the quiet of a Nor- 
mandy inn into the clangour of a metropolitan 
centre. 

Kaleidoscopic as changes wrought at a 
masque were some of the surprises served to 
the eye. 

The American beauty of the Houlgate sea- 
son, unrecognizable a moment before, when 
seated in her red-painted car, was now proven 
to be a beauty and no monster. Her unsightly 
envelope of rubber coat, goggles, and thick veil 
once shed, the flower of her loveliness emerged 
fresh as the growing roses about her. 

A certain prince, however, lying flat on his 
back, in the inner courtyard, beneath the broken 
vertebra of his car, was the true focal attrac- 
tion. He was the hero of the hour. Be- 
grimed, oily, besmirched, this scion of one of 
the oldest of great French houses, was ac- 
claimed as ideal a fio;ure as were certain of his 
ancestors. 



6 FALAISE 

The youthful prostrate form was being all 
but mobbed. Any number of great ladies, and 
others less great, left their omelettes to cool, 
that they might circle about the hero prince. 

" He 's a dead game sport ! " a lovely Anony- 
ma cried out, as she bent her vast tulle turban 
above the dislocations of the wrenched wheel. 

" Tres crane, ga — I really did n't think it of 
him ! " sotto-voce'd a lady of the right aristo- 
cratic faubourg, as she imperilled the purity 
of her laces to Q:et a better look at her vounor 
friend. 

The blows dealt by this young nobleman's 
hammer were making an al fresco breakfast in 
this picturesque old inn as peaceful and agree- 
able a meal as if eaten in a foundry. But what 
of that } Or what of the poisoning of an air, 
usually as sweet as roses and ozone produce, 
with smells such as formerly overhung a medi- 
aeval town ? Both noise and smells but proved 
the inn to be in the very highest fashion of 
our day. 

In the midst of a world so gay and up-to- 
date, the rickety old omnibus, as it creaked 
its way between the frou-frou of the ladies' 



AN INN COURTYARD 7 

skirts, seemed an anachronism. A peasant 
and an abbe, who had souQ^ht a vine-covered 
shed as if it were a cloistered retreat from 
which to view the dazzle and glitter of the 
brilliant scene, were two more. 

A third was a Normandy char-a-bancs, into 
which maidservants and hostlers were placing 
portmanteaux and other travelling impedi- 
menta. In so venerable an inn as one dating 
from the Conqueror, for its world to sneer at 
a Norman cart would seem incredible. But 
its novel use had brought about the usual 
sharpness of criticism. To drive, indeed, 
when all the world was automobiling or 
cycling — even though the gain in speed 
should send one the quicker into the world 
beyond! Above all — to choose a peasant's 
cart ! — to say nothing of going inland when 
all Paris was lining the bright Calvados 
beaches ! No, only the countries beyond the 
sea bred such choice varieties as that ! 

This verdict was conveyed to us by any 
number of eyes. The French eye differs from 
its better-disciplined sister below it — the suave 
Gallic mouth — in this : it will tell you the 



8 FALAISE 

truth with an almost refreshing Anglo-Saxon 
sincerity. Who sees the monster, when the 
ear is being seduced by the caressing French 
syllables ? Those hundreds of eyes were speak- 
ing plain truths and, though lips were working, 
since no words reached the ear, we were left in 
no doubt whatever as to the true import of 
the message. 

For my own part, I should like to have 
made a rejoinder. Any number of fine things 
have occurred to me since, as the right answer 
to have given, there and then, from the broad 
seat of that char-a-bancs. 

First of all, every Frenchman in that gay 
courtyard would have been the better for 
knowing that Americans, when they travel, 
are the wisest of fools — they commit the 
prudent folly of first enrolling themselves 
under the banner of sentiment. Now in mat- 
ters pertaining to sentiment we Americans are 
as inexorable as we are consistent. We must 
have the old and the historic served up to us 
with the sauce of reality. Restorations we 
resent as a personal injury. Innovations are 
criminal. Yet such is our inconsistency, we 



AN INN COURTYARD 9 

are not over-keen about breathing the same air 
as that with which antiquity went into business, 
so to speak. We prefer the picturesque, when 
hygienically plumbed. Let it, however, be- 
ware of becomino* the fashion. We and the 
ghosts, the latter properly disinfected, must 
have the place to ourselves. 

Hence the logic of starting for an eleventh- 
century Fair in a Normandy char-a-bancs. 

Here was an expedition with the right his- 
toric flavor. The cross-country drive would 
be the test as to whether all Normandy had 
gone the way of this old inn ; whether, also, 
by the roads we were to go, in those rolling 
fifty miles, the smile of adventure might not 
be caught dimpling the cheek of the common- 
place ; and whether, at our journey's end, w^e 
might not touch hands with customs as old 
as the feudal centuries. Falaise, the town of 
William, and his cradle, we were told, was a 
town in a thousand. 

Across the melting greens of the vast Caen 
plains, from the heights above Dives, the 
town on its bright inland cliffs had, indeed, 
been beckoning us with alluring insistence. 



lO FA LA IS E 

Churches, squares, and antique-faced streets 
were, it was said, clustered close as when they 
felt the protective clasp of stout brown walls ; 
the great fortress, the famous Norman strong- 
hold, with brave semblance of its former might, 
was still to be seen fronting the misty vale 
below ; from its base of rock to tree-domed 
height, the perfect Talbot Tower upsprang 
with unimpaired grace ; and the tiny Ante, 
dyed now as in the long-ago centuries in its 
tanner's hues, trickled still between the low 
banks where Arlette's feet showed white 
against the red. 

In early August, horses also, by the thou- 
sands, with their farmer-breeders, gathered still 
to join in the motley of one of the most pic- 
turesque processions that ever tramped a 
French high-road. 

With such a journey in prospect, who, in- 
deed, would not be going to the Fair at Falaise 
in a Normandy char-a-bancs ? 

Had this project been but rightly presented 
to that company of breakfasters, what a send- 
off would those critical Parisians have given to 
cart and occupants ! William the Conqueror 



AN INN COURTYARD II 

would surely have been right royally toasted 
— a figure as delectable, for a second of retro- 
spect, as were the sauces in which this, his inn, 
have chiefly embalmed his memory. Arlette 
would also have had a golden moment of suc- 
cess ; it was so long since any one had thought 
of her, she would have presented herself as 
an absolute novelty. As for the horses, ah ! 
well, horses in groups of thousands, they also 
would be fine to see ! Who knows, one may 
go back to them some day! Sapristil but 
what if these Americans were right, after all, 
in choosing to take a drive through the quiet 
Normandy lanes, in pursuit of the mediaeval 
and the picturesque, in lieu of speeding to the 
races through clouds of dust and banks of 
noxious gases ? 

With this doubt flecking their pleasure, 
every one of those Frenchmen, to a man, 
would have risen and cheered us onward, to 
the echo. They most certainly would, that is, 
had the above programme been but submitted 
to them. 

As it fell out, among those hundreds of 
breakfasters, we found but a single Norman 



1 2 FALAISE 

to approve of either our project or our choice 
of equipage. 

" Ce que vous faites la — what you are about 
to do — is most wise. The Fair is perishing 
day by day. In a few years there will be 
nothing to see. Et d'ici-la — and as for the 
drive — it is a country in a thousand! The 
little cart will roll you along as if it were on 
wings. It is light as air. The horse — he also 
will carry you well, for he knows the road." 

When one's own w^orld turns critic, the 
praises of even a hostler sound sweet in the 
ear. But Henri's eulogiums, we swiftly re- 
flected, must not too greatly elate us, for, as 
it happened, he was the owner of both the 
horse and the char-a-bancs. 



CHAPTER II 

THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD 

ONCE out upon the road, even the 
smoke from the ever-encroaching fac- 
tories near by could not dull the gold of the 
Normandy noon. It was the sort of day 
when the sun rays seem to have a personal 
message for every human creature. The air 
was instinct with a life-giving freshness. One 
had the sense of moving forward through 
buoyant waves of air. 

Some comforting rural relics of older, un- 
spoiled Normandy were lining the banks of 
the Dives canal. On their knees, beside the 
flowino- water, there was the usual miscel- 
laneous assortment of the village vigilants. 
The chorus of the laughing, chattering Dives 
laundresses was ever the same. No younger, 
no older, for a good seven years, at least, they 
had seemed as fixed in shape and outline as 



14 FALAISE 

those other choruses regularly set before us on 
operatic boards. 

On the opposite bank, there was another 
figure, equally familiar — that of 'He f tit sol- 
daf' a-fishing. 

I never remember to have crossed this part 
of the Cabourg and Caen road without seeing 
this little soldier standino^ there, rod in hand. 
Whether or not it is always the same man who 
is buttoned up in the same ill-fitting uniform, 
I cannot say. The man may have been 
changed many times, have gone off on wars, 
or long furloughs, or died, or been married. 
What happened to the man I know not. 
From a non-military point of view, it was, 
however, the same little soldier one saw on 
the green, flowery banks. Of the same shape 
and size, small, not too well-modelled, broad of 
shoulder and wide of leg, his passion for his 
chosen sport, obviously, was not of the biting 
sort. He held his rod ever with the same list- 
less air, as if to say, " Bieii ! since one is not 
drilling, or getting drunk, or killing, or mak- 
ing love — ma foi — one might as well fish." 
His eye, whatever its color, I noticed, was 



THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD 15 

ever on the bridge and the road, and never, 
by any chance, upon the limp rod. Never 
once, in all the summers I have watched it, 
did I see that curving rod seized with the 
right convulsive twitching — a motion so 
thrilling to the true fisherman. 

The little soldier, in his bright red trousers, 
blue coat, belted in brass, appears to be 
unique ; — a French exhibit, — quite by him- 
self. 

Perhaps he came in with the Conqueror. 
The river Dives, if not the canal, was popu- 
lous with soldiers and boat-builders on a cer- 
tain memorable historic occasion. Fishine 
must have been in the his^hest fashion durinof 
the weary days when William was waiting for 
the right winds to blow and they would not. 

As if content with its high place in history, 
the river Dives has never done an honest 
stroke of work since the Conquest. It ap- 
pears to be as useless a stream as any in 
France. 

The straight, gay road to Varaville was 
a livelier companion. Once our faces turned 
towards the great Caen plain, and we had 



1 6 FA LA IS E 

the right sort of roadside company. High 
covered carts, farmers, a herd of sheep with 
some lambs, teaching themselves, awkwardly, 
how to skip ; a donkey with empty milk 
jugs rattling like musketry shot along its 
patient trit-trotting sides ; and a swallow or 
two, garlanding the air with song — here were 
the very creatures we had hoped to secure 
as our fellow- wayfarers. 

A poet might have been forgiven had he 
written an ode to the day and the scene. As 
all the best odes to the sea, if I remember 
rightly, have been written by poets who felt it 
safest to remain on shore, for purely personal 
reasons, our poet would probably have had a 
preference for motor-cycles as against any ve- 
hicle so old-fashioned as a Normandy cart. 

Once more our choice of vehicle was being 
commented upon. These critics, however, 
who passed us by, with amazement writ large 
in their eyes, were at least as competent as 
they were honest. 

Some of the peasants we met stopped still, 
it is true, as the thrill of their wonder shot 
through them. Pigs, yes; young calves; 



THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD 



17 



ducks and geese with their legs tied ; rabbits, 
hares and every variety of hen and cock — 
as well as household goods, if need were, — 
all these and 
how many other 
things or crea- 
tures, has not a 
Normandy char- 
a-bancs driven 
to market? But 
a lady in white 
duck, with a hat 
never fashioned 
by Norman fin- 
gers, and a gen- 
tle m a n who 
drove his steed 
without using a 
single Norman 
oath, or even a 

" Otii-da! " this indeed was a strange adven- 
ture for a char-a-bancs ! 

''Ah, Dame! but it's funny! cest drole ! 
Yet it seems to go well — the horse is a 
good one!" That was the first and last of 




So7ne Peasant Critics. 



1 8 FALAISE 

all the peasant verdicts. Our earliest critic 
stood stock-still on the flat cross-road we had 
taken to Varaville. He confided his opinion 
to his young son, who was leading a cow. 
The cow and her driver were having it out as 
to which should occupy the whole of the road. 
While the issue was being decided, and whips 
were cracking, the farmer saw the chance of 
assuaging the thirst of his curiosity. 

" Monsieur and Madame go perhaps to Caen } " 

The man's wrinkled old face, with its eager 
agate eyes and ridged lips, was close to our 
wheel ; for the cow had waltzed off with our 
whip-lash, and her owner was skilfully repair- 
ing the damage. 

"No, — to Falaise!" 

" 'Cre nom de D — / to Falaise, — it 's a day's 
journey. Saprelotte — ccst loin dti pays ! " 

" C 'est loin du pays I " 

The words rang in the ear — as we rolled 
swiftly along under the fluttering elms. What 
fascination of old-time customs, of homely tra- 
ditions to which France is still hidebound, 
lie in the phrase, for French rustic ears ! 
France, that charmer, has woven a web for 



THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD 19 

her country-folk stronger than all promise of 
earthly good elsewhere. The bit of country 
wherein one is born and reared ; the twenty- 
mile circuit that, to the narrow peasant-vision 
is the true, the only pays ! the soil where one 
has danced, and toiled, and where first love 
has come to make the senses sing — genera- 
tions of men and women have transmitted 
the tender tradition that to live thus within 
shadow of the home-door is the best of all 
portions for a peasant. To go away — loin du 
pays — spells expatriation as strongly to the 
Frenchman to-day as it did a hundred years 
ago. For a girl, even in our quick transit 
days — to marry out of her district, is to invite 
matrimonial shipwreck. Le pays will not be 
near to watch, to warn, and to counsel. For a 
man — even an author — to leave his imme- 
diate neighborhood is for him to link arms 
with reprehensible adventure. The Midi, for 
example, think you it was Tartarin alone the 
sons of Provence had to forgive their Daudet ? 
It was his turning his back on Nimes, and his 
writing in the foreign French tongue ! Mis- 
tral under his olive boughs at Maillarme — 



20 FA LA IS E 

writing his poems in ProYen9ale, here is the 
true, the ideal figure of a great man in his 
n'orht milieu. There — where he was born — 
a Frenchman, be he peasant or genius, it is 
on his birth soil he ought to live and die. 
When France herself, as a nation, attempts 
to colonize, does she not put to the test, and 
before the eyes of the world, the limits of her 
capacity ? When loin du pays she is ill at 
ease, feels herself to be on foreign soil, whim- 
pers with the sob of homesickness, and is 
never at home in her new-made house, how- 
ever fair it may be. 

At our first wayside inn, where we stopped 
to ask our road to Troarn, the Normandy 
bar-maid, being of a younger generation than 
the farmer, and gifted with the fine art of 
divination, knew better than to ask a ques- 
tion. She was only an inn bar-maid. The 
fashion plates, however, having taught her how 
to wear a shirt-waist and how to cut a check- 
ered skirt, the pink of her bodice set off eyes 
and a dark crown of hair that might have trans- 
formed even a realist into a poet 

We w^ere to turn to the left, and then straight 



THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD 21 

on until we reached Bures, the cherry lips said. 
Then they parted in a comprehending smile. 
What the eyes said, above the smile, with per- 
fect distinctness was — ■ " Cette dame et ce mon- 
sieitr are doing this for a joke, — or a bet. 
They are strangers. They have never seen a 
cart like this before. They will drive till they 
are tired. We shall see them back in an 
hour." The dark eyes were full of prophecy 
and the little bow of a well-bred deference. 

The next peasant we met was of the newer 
order. He belonged to the Society of So- 
cialists. He accepted the char-a-bancs in good 
faith ; he believed in it as a pledge of our prin- 
ciples ; it was a sign of better days to come. 
He was in the act of drinking and he offered 
us a share of his cider. It cut us to the heart 
not to toast his liberality. But the night 
waited for no man ; and we had still a good 
forty odd miles before us — ^ we explained. 

" It was all the same to him," he would have 
us to understand, and he drained his glass. 

Thus it fell out that we felt ourselves to be 
at home on the high-road. 



CHAPTER III 

THE CAEN PLAINS 

HEDGES, thick and dense ; thatched huts ; 
farmyards whose open courtyards con- 
tributed hvely notes of color to the tree-tented 
plains ; thousands of moving cattle and romp- 
ing horses to carry the eye from the breadth of 
meadows to low heights swimming in the gold 
of the noon glow — such were the pictures that 
were set along our roadway. 

In these cool moist plains, noise that, along 
the coast had plagued the air as with tb.e clang- 
our of a mighty bell, was softened to a pastoral 
peace. The company of cows munched and 
moved among the grasses. From any one of 
the fields one could hear the crow of the chan- 
ticleer, a note as soothing and significant to 
nature-loving Theocritus as to our own trolley- 
car and electric-bell-outraged nervous systems. 

Few landscapes in the world can equal the 
flat pasture lands of Upper Calvados. The 



THE CAEN PLAINS 



proximity of the sea peoples the sky with float- 
ing cloud-masses, the humidity of its air giving 
to all vegetation a depth of green peculiar to 
moist climates. 

Little by little, the subtle and satisfying 
charm of this Normandy landscape was pro- 
ducing an effect .^_.^^^_,^_^_ 
not wholly new^ 
— to me, at least. 
So penetrating 
have I felt this 
charm to be, that 
in just such Nor- 
mandy scenes, 
and on just such 
warm, balmy 
days, I have had 

that rarest of human sensations, — a satisfied, 
completed sense of perfect enjoyment. The 
man or woman w4io loves nature, sanely, can be 
made more entirely content, I believe, in the 
rich inland parts of this marvellous Normandy 
province than in any other country. 

Light, space, breadth, we seemed indeed 
moving through a new world, one fashioned 




Across the Caen Plains. 



24 FALAISE 

by God Himself. Man and his many inven- 
tions were as far removed from the spacious, 
airy chamber roofed with blue, as were certain 
warlike, semi-savage shapes that, a shadowy 
company, had been haunting the green world 
walling our cart-wheels. 

The shapes had massed themselves along 
the ridees of the heio:hts at our left. These 
phantom forms were the ghosts of that forgot- 
ten army that, centuries ago, looked down, 
alone with their kino;, on their soldier-com- 
rades' fate on these plains, when William — 
not yet Conqueror — still smarting under the 
sting of Bastard, had ridden down from Falaise 
to show his king how a soldier and a general 
who knew his trade could wait for the right 
moment, knew just where to strike to hit and 
hurt the hardest. 

The ford at Varaville, that we had passed 
but a half mile back, was the point where this 
wily Norman had chosen to trap his king. 
King Henry, as it happened, had no business, 
he and his hundred thousand, at Varaville. 
This invasion of Normandy being the second 
attack on William's duchy by Henry, who, as 



THE CAEN PLAINS 25 

it chanced, could never think on Normandy 
without breaking the tenth commandment — 
William had determined it should also be the 
last. Henry and his great army were allowed 
to ravage the land: to burn what, in that 
nascent eleventh century, there was of Caen 
to burn : — and then, as the Frenchmen were 
on their way homewards, to carry spoils and 
the brimming sense of easy conquest back to 
Paris with them, it was precisely at that 
moment of gloating that William the avenger 
struck, and struck unto death. 

The lovely Caen plain was not as fertile and 
jocund a land, in those earlier centuries, as it is 
now. At a time when all France was half forest, 
these great plains presented the usual barriers 
to a mediaeval army's march. Marshes, 
morass, thickets, a jungle of tangled vines and 
wild underbrush, William knew his own land 
w^ell. It was such a wilderness as this into 
which the young and wily duke had let his 
over-lord's army wander, unhindered. 

He and his own twenty thousand fell upon 
the Frenchmen at their most helpless moment. 
Half the French army had crossed the Vara- 



26 FALAISE 

ville ford. The king and his bodyguard al- 
ready had gained the Dives heights : up the 
green slopes horses and men were gayly mount- 
ing — the song of a bloodless triumph on their 
lip. 

What were the cries, the shrieks for help 
that came from the plain ? King and men 
with one accord turned, only to swell in their 
turn the chorus of pain and death with their 
own groans and howls of rage. 

Where had the Bastard hidden himself — 
he and what seemed that mighty host of men 
who were fallino- uDon the Frenchmen with 
the power of ruthless giants ? Helpless indeed 
was that hapless army. Henry must stand 
there, in his impotent fury, and watch from the 
low hills that seemed to have piled themselves 
up to their present altitude for the sole pur- 
pose of affording the king a better view of the 
destruction going on below, the great com- 
panies of maddened Frenchmen who were 
plunging themselves waist-deep into the murky 
waters of the ford. Behold ! — about, behind, 
before them, were those terrible Normans, 
nimble as cats in their short tunics, quick with 



THE CAEN PLAINS 27 

the lance and bow as a cloud to drop rain, 
picking off the swimming, struggling French- 
men as easily as if they were but berries, 
thrustins: them back into the water with their 
lances, and thus killing them — till the Va- 
raville ford ran blood so thick it crimsoned the 
sea. 

Across the hills Henry and his army had 
no choice but to flee, for William and his 
bowmen were waiting below to complete their 
work. 

It has taken all the intervening centuries to 
complete that work. Norman, Englishman, 
Catholic, Protestant, noble, peasant, each in 
turn has drenched these plains in blood. Once 
more the Norman now owns his Norman land. 
And in lieu of that shadowy company — of 
that phantom host of warriors, killing and 
killed — behold the silent company of moving 
cattle, carrying, from glistening grass-lands to 
violet-hued tree trunks, their brilliantly lit 
hides. 

The Caen plains, in lieu of their fame as 
a battlefield, have been renowned for the 
breeds of horses and cattle raised upon them. 



2 8 FA LAIS E 

Many of the very horses we were to see at 
the Fair on the morrow had been raised on 
these meadows. The rich grasses, the succu- 
lent weeds, and the many brooks with which 
the plains are watered have given a Continen- 
tal reputation to these pasture lands. 

By the exuberance of their spirits, their 
joyous plunges and sonorous snortings, the 
colts and horses especially manifested their 
approval of this open-air cure and system of 
development. 

Such lively companions had the effect of 
inducing our own little Normandy stallion to 
show off his paces. The cart, as its owner 
had prophesied, was now rolling along " as 
lieht as air." The roads w^ere as flat as a 
table. This new inland warmth and dryness 
in the air made the whip a useless menace. 
In and out of sunny villages we were swept 
with a dash that nearly finished us — before, 
so to speak, we were fairly begun. 

Two mettlesome Percherons, vigorously pull- 
ing a huo-e cart filled with cider barrels, had 
the stubbornness to hold the whole of the road 
against their driver's whip-lashing objections. 



THE CAEN PLAINS 29 

Normand contre Normand — the encounter 
was bound to be characteristic. Our own 
sturdy steed, Hke his namesake — Henri IV — 
wisely played the game of concession. He 
appeared to yield the point of the heavier team 
keeping to the safer middle of a none-too-wide 
roadway. But once he had conceded the 
point, and his revenge was planned. The 
Percherons were swinging along in single file, 
with kingly step. Our game little stallion 
suddenly turned from his treading the ditch- 
path. He gave a shriek as of a horse-devil let 
loose, and the first kingly Percheron had the 
surprise of his life. Into his ribs Henri IV 
planted a w^ell-aimed head-blow. The surprise 
had the desired effect. The cider cart was 
promptly swerved to the left. The right of 
way once won, our valiant little warrior sped 
merrily onwards, as if hitting horses twice his 
size was a game exactly to his taste. 



CHAPTER IV 

CHATEAUX AND CHURCH SPIRES 

HAY-CARTS and char-a-bancs rattling 
merrily along the densely-shaded roads ; 
wandering sheep, with shepherds in their classic 
cloaks on low hillsides, with eyes upon their 
flocks ; dogs of that vagrant variety who always 
appears to have business to transact in a neigh- 
boring village; — these wayfarers and a com- 
pany of bicyclists who, like ourselves, were 
bound for the Fair — such were the successors 
to the Norman dukes now to be met along the 
road. 

Two of that company of bicyclists were of 
the neighborly, talkative sort. Their own 

wheeling they found less original than 
ours. 

" TiensF' — ( being Beaux Arts students from 
Illinois they were quite reckless of their notice- 
ably recent acquirements of the French lan- 
guage ) " mais, — cest d'un chic — ga! — how 



chAteaux and church spires 31 

had we ever thought of it — and why hadn't it 
been thought of before ? RattUng ! perfectly 
rattling fun, to be going about in a char-a-bancs 
and with a Normandy stallion! By Jove! how 
he went, though ! how they all went — these 
Normandy horses! At the Fair — there were 
to be thousands," they had heard, " and was n't 
the country ripping! Simply reeking with 
good things, w^as n't it ? " 

They had been days on the road, they said, 
sketching and photographing. And then — 
with a common impulse, they turned their 
cameras on us, — quite as though they were 
doing us a favor. Before they remounted — 
they assured us " they had us — down fine!" 
and away they flew, nodding and smiling, aglow 
with the satisfaction of having done a sfood 
deed. 

At least one of the statements made by these 
future American architects was altogether 
right. Scarcely a village but gave eloquent 
proof of having felt the tremendous impetus of 
the great Norman and early Gothic movements. 
At Troarn, at Argences, at Moult — church 
towers and noble Norman or Pointed Gothic 



32 FA LA IS E 

porches proved the generous rivalry that had 
fired the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth 
century chisels with the passion of producing 
architectural masterpieces. 

The transitions to be traced from Roman 
basilica models to the flowering of the Gothic 
— the earlier thirteenth-century work — you 
could spell out that wondrous writing in 
carvings, where still lingered pale touches of 
color ; or in rich and shadowy doorways ; or 
in arches soaring skyward. Scarcely a ham- 
let but boasted of architectural triumphs in 
churches, any one of which would have made 
the reputation of a modern architect so peril- 
ously great as to have insured him the charge 
of gross imitation. 

One of the secrets of the perdurable fascina- 
tion of France, lies in its presentment of a 
collection of as rich contrasts, within a limited 
area, as any land the sun shines upon. In this 
remote inland country, its engaging assort- 
ment of church spires was not the sole sur- 
prise. Stately chateaux uprose along our 
roadway, some wall-inclosed, others as defence- 
less as were the sfrass-roofed huts. 



CHATEAUX AND CHURCH SPIRES ^t^ 

One of these, close to Valmeray, was of the 
Grand Roi period. Its severe, but imposing 
fa9ade, like the courtiers surrounding that 
august monarch, had copied the style of that 
ceremonious epoch. Set thus in its rural frame, 
within the narrow margin of formal gardens, 
the meadows and high-roofed hay-ricks nea,r 
by made the aspect of the great house doubly 
formidable. 

Just beyond the chateau a noble avenue of 
elms clasped their upper boughs to let the 
company of road-farers pass on. 

At St. Sylvain even our sturdy little stallion 
knew better than to rush through such a town 
at a gallop. A church set upon an eminence, 
in the midst of streets as alive as if born of 
American enterprise and built in a night, and 
yet of unmistakable antiquity, this was no town 
to sweep with an eye-glance. The church, 
with its noble square tower, and each one of 
the tortuous, gray-faced streets seemed to be 
inviting inspection. In any one of the old 
houses, with their gabled ends, timbered fronts 
and vine and flower window-decorations, one 
might have settled down, on nothing a year, 



24 FALAISE 

and lived a life of peace — and also of that 
monotony which passeth all metropolitan 
understanding. 

Caesar was one of those who had no appetite 
for the wonted. His travels — felicitously 
termed conquests — relieved an existence that 
mieht otherwise have turned into a form of 
Roman en7iui. 

His critical, fastidious soldier's eye is said to 
have looked through the curtains of his litter, 
upon this part of Normandy when it was called 
Lexovii. The traces of a Roman road, starting 
from St. Sylvain, are still easily discernible. 

Old armor, arrow-heads, tent pegs, coins, — 
the Norman soil hereabouts has yielded, and 
yields yet, a large supply of such relics to fatten 
the Caen, Bayeux and Rouen museums. Dur- 
ing the ^v^ hundred years of that now misty 
Roman occupation, these plains and low hills 
were thick with villas and gardens. Along 
the road yonder — no further away than 
Bignette — but a few short miles beyond 
St. Sylvain, the Romans having lived, loved, 
married, and died, beneath these Norman 
skies, went to their long rest in the tombs 



CHATEAUX AND CHURCH SPIRES 35 

lining the roadway — that place of burial 
marking the claim of those thus buried as 
worthy of enduring fame. 

What has mocking Time written on those 
vanished tombal sites ? Weeds erow now 
where sonorous Latin verse once made the 
marble sing with elegiac praise. 

Past Roman roads, with their lost or scat- 
tered sarcophagi, past turreted chateaux we 
swept onwards — into the land of the reapers. 

Far as the eye could reach was a land of 
gold. We were in the midst of wheat fields. 
The rising ground which took us on to Brette- 
ville showed the blond landscape to be at its 
ripened harvest moment. All through the 
fields, men and women were bending and mov- 
ing onwards with the rhythmic motion peculiar 
to scythe cutters. They bent to their task 
with the suppleness born of strength. 

Those who have argued themselves into the 
logical conviction that France must be classi- 
fied among the dying nations — let such leave 
the safe seclusion of their libraries and air their 
conclusions in these wheatfields of inland Nor- 
mandy. Not a harvester was here who would 



36 FALAISE 

not have given his grandsires of the anti-Revo- 
hitionary days a shock of surprise. Where 
are the " beasts," shrunken, shrivelled, naked, 
dying of hunger and cold, who, crouched as 
beasts crouch, along the roadside, when they 
rose to their height, were yet seen to be men ? 
Had I taken no longer drive than this 
through provincial France, the sight of these 
sturdy, hardy, harvesters — and a small army 
they numbered before we passed the last of 
them at Bretteville — the sight of such as 
these would have set me thinking. A nation 
that can recover from such a death-thrust — 
or a blood-letting — I '11 not quibble at a 
phrase — as that of the Revolution, and rise 
from its bed of torture stronger, hardier, 
healthier, sounder, at its core — note the core 
— than in centuries before, has yet a few vig- 
orous centuries ahead of it, I, for one, cannot 
help thinking. 



CHAPTER V 

ON THE ROAD TO CAEN AND TOURS 

IT was just beyond Bretteville that we came 
upon a road as familiar of feature and 
aspect as is the face of a friend. For my own 
part, the particular kind of road before us I 
have always classed along with those friend- 
ships one salutes with respect — and which one 
prefers to keep at a distance. 

The French military high-road, of such ines- 
timable utility to France — to her farmer even 
more than to her armies — presents everywhere 
the same utilitarian features. Straight as the 
points to be touched will allow, hard as duty, 
bordered by trees laid out on a system whose 
meagre shade seems to delight in refusing to 
carry out the benevolent but mistaken inten- 
tions of the Government, — the trim but rigid- 
faced military high-road is the road of all others 
to avoid in this shapely land of France. 



2 8 FA LA IS E 

A strolling company of players, abroad upon 
the white macadam, were of quite another mind. 
Their carts and wagons having come to a stop, 
the road was as warm with the tatterdemalion 
brood such " companies of the king's highway " 
exude, in any age and in all lands. Of the 
tallest of the bandit-looking gypsies we asked 
our way. 

"Tout droit, msieur — straight ahead — 
and the most beautiful road in the world ! " 
was cried out to us, exultingly, by a tall gypsy 
athlete. He himself was walking along the 
" most beautiful road in the world " with a 
prodigious swagger. He also was going down 
to the Fair, — he said — '' avec ^a — with that " 
— and he pointed to the tent poles, the tent- 
ing, and the picture-painted carts. The latter 
were peopled at every window and peephole 
with the bristling eyes of gypsy tight-rope 
dancers, jugglers, and the Amazonian queens 
of the ring — all in the rigid economy of mis- 
fits circus performers consider just the thing 
for the road. 

" With that, I shall make a good week of it. 
At Caen — ah yes ! we did a great business at 



ON THE ROAD TO CAEN AND TOURS 39 

Caen — tres gats les Caennois. At Falaise 
there are mostly peasants " — he shrugged his 
lean but tightly-muscled shoulders — " But the 
Norman peasant is rich — he will pay to see 
a good thing." The dark head nodded back- 
wards, with the pride of one who knows what 
he has. 

Through the windows of the next cart, two 
dusky-skinned girls, with drooping locks, fram- 
ing small, delicately sculptured features and 
dazzHng teeth, grinned and snickered. 

We had seen the best of the show, doubtless, 
and for nothing. 

The gypsy's praise of the Caen high-road we 
conceded to be not wholly unfounded. The 
trees were at an age when benevolence is 
the first of all virtues ; their shade was of 
the massive, maternal sort. Within the green 
light, enriched by the amber of a setting 
August sun, villages and farmhouses were 
suffused with an indescribable glow. The 
land through the tree trunks, as luminous as 
the tinted horizon, seemed a blond sea of light. 
Rough and coarsened features that looked 
up from the roadside, above wheelbarrows 



40 FALAISE 

or ploughs, were momentarily transfigured. 
Along the door-steps and stone benches — 
at Langannerei, at Potigny, the village house- 
wives, as they sat and chattered, seemed to 
have taken on unreal, phantasmal outlines and 
garments. Caps and homespun aprons were 
dyed as in a bath of gold. Timbered house 
fronts, the flowers in their tiny pots, the very 
pigs and turkeys — not a feature in the land- 
scape but came in for its share of that lovely 
moment of illumination. 

As if to incarnate the beauty of the hour 
and its rustic features, out of the ripe wheat 
fields, whose edges she had skirted, a milkmaid 
started to cross the road. She waited for our 
cart to be gone. The pose she took, in that 
instant of repose, was one that has been ren- 
dered as classic as that of the Venus de Milo. 
With full milk-jug poised on her broad shoul- 
der, with arm and hand outstretched to the full 
length of the leather strap attached to the urn- 
shaped Normandy canne, this rustic divinity 
had the same goddess-like nobility of carriage 
and outline Millet has transfixed on his canvas. 
To look upon his model thus in the flesh, — 



ON THE ROAD TO CAEN AND TOURS 41 

In all the convincing realities of coarse knit 
stockings, work-colored hands, and face and 
open throat brown as a nut, was to see proved 
anew the axiom that the greatest artists are 
those who transfigure the commonplace into 
the ideal. 

As a substitute for those wondrous Nor- 
mandy maidens, presented to us now, alas ! 
solely through the medium of colored prints 
or such operettas as " Les Cloches de Corne- 
villel' I recommend this particular order of 
milkmaid. Like the immortal Mrs. Glass's 
receipt for jugged hare — first, however, you 
must catch your milkmaid. 

Where are they fled, those fair young girls 
and opulent featured women, who formerly 
proved the ease of their purses, by their dainty 
dressing 1 When they went forth, pillion fash- 
ion, what gay striped gowns, shortened to show 
the clocked stockings and neat heelless slippers, 
what coquetry in choice of apron stuffs, what 
rich lace floating from the high peak of their 
wondrous headgear! In the tying of their very 
kerchiefs, in the grace of the knot, they thus 
proclaimed not only the universal feminine 



42 FALAISE 

idolatry of dress — but the possession of a 
certain lost leisure. One must go as far as 
Aries nowadays, and to the Sundays of St. 
Remy-de- Provence, to see the women of the 
fields gowned and kerchiefed like queens on 
the one festal day of their workaday week. 

The costume of Falaise, as preserved to us 
through the old prints, was peculiarly rich in 
elaboration of details. How the gay ribbons, 
high pyramidal coifs, and brilliant striped 
skirts would have set off the ripe charms, the 
melting eyes, and creamy skins of the maidens 
who bent over their geranium-boxes, in the 
villages we passed, to see who were going to 
the Fair. 

That man has a soul, and eyes, above 
the costume of the period, was proved by 
the numbers of young farmers who found it 
wisest to go slowly as they passed the gera- 
nium-boxes. 

A half-dozen very promising flirtations were 
started, within full view of the road. One or 
two of the more energetic rustic gallants 
temporarily relinquished all thoughts of Fairs 
and the morrow. The scene between the 



ON THE ROAD TO CAEN AND TOURS 43 

couples was played with all the finish of a 
good stage performance. The girls suddenly 
disappeared, only to reappear at the doorstep 
of their blooming little huts, or houses, where 
their adorers were waiting, to lead them to the 
village tavern-tables. 

For we were nearing Falaise, and the jocund 
spirit of the Fair was tripping a few measures 
here in the open fields and hamlets. 

As we approached Falaise the dust and the 
din thickened. All the neighboring farmers 
whose horses were being driven or led to the 
Fair were crowding the white road. Tree 
trunks and hedge-rows were blanched with 
the dust of the gritty macadam ; men's 
faces were powdered and their blouses were 
whitened with the loosened particles. The 
horses alone^ in their spirited dashes, had man- 
aged to keep the satin of their well-groomed 
coats spotless. 

The air was already thick with the voices of 
barter and sale, with shouts of welcome, with 
cries of recognition, with a demains ! and 
promises of reunion, within an hour, at various 
inns and taverns. 



44 



FALAISE 



At the bottom of a certain hill, there was a 
visible slackening of the speed of both riders 
and drivers. A girl, whose head and shoulders 
alone were visible above the gleaming backs of 




A Small Chateau near Falaise. 



a herd of cows she was guiding, from one 
pasture to another, across the road, threw her 
smile backwards to us. We one and all drew 
rein to let her pass. A rustic groom, astride a 
gray mottled Percheron, cut one of her cows 
with his whip; for behind him were four stal- 
lions whose spirits were still untamed by their 
long cross-country trot. 



ON THE ROAD TO CAEN AND TOURS 45 

" Ah ! Dame, if one must wait for such as 
these," cried the boy, but he too laughed as he 
kept his own beasts in hand till the girl had 
coaxed her cows to their home pastures. 

" Fine stallions those ! " cried a man sud- 
denly, at our right, poking his head out of a 
gig. As he leaned forward he showed the high 
Norman cheek-bones, the keen blue-gray eyes, 
the arched nose of the true figure de coq. 
" Who sends them ? " he cried to the groom. 

" They come from Monsieur D 's farm." 

" Ah, you will be near the square, then, to- 
morrow ? " 

" All the day long ! " cried back the groom, 
as, his horse rearing, he gave him a cut that 
sent him dashing uphill, unhindered by the 
drag of the horses behind. 

Twenty such rendezvous were made in our 
hearing, as we all slowly crept up the hillside. 
Not a horse inside of a harness or out, but was 
looked over, commented upon, or perhaps, sil- 
ently marked out for a bargain. Besides the 
press of peasants, of horses, gigs, carts, bicy- 
clists, and the regiment of the tow^n tramp 
dogs, a great deal of bad language was making 



46 FALAISE 

its way up the hill. Horses appear to suggest 
to the least imaginative man the wealth in 
felicitous phraseology that lie hidden in the 
bed of profanity. Scarcely a Norman I should 
say, going up to the Fair grounds yonder, but 
must have heard either his own, or his wife's 
family referred to in terms w^hich men reserve, 
as a rule, for moments of excitement. Some 
harmless but very-much-in-the-way old women, 
trundling wheelbarrows piled high with mer- 
chandise and garden truck, came in for some 
of the choicer coinage of opprobrium. 

Two handsome wenches, bold of eye and 
of massive build, suddenly turned a corner, — 
and down the hill rolled the stream of oaths. 

" 'Cre iiom, — if she is n't a fine one ! " 

" No, it 's t' other 's to my taste. Hey ! Hey ! 
there! don't go off like that, — how's a fellow 
to know you again, — si on senvole comme fa ? " 

A hundred eyes followed the somewhat heavy 
flight of the rustic beauties. In peace now 
the old women wheeled their burdens up the 
hill. 



CHAPTER VI 

FALAISE STREET SCENES 

SUDDENLY the hill widened. Vistas 
opened and roads seemed to spring out of 
unseen valleys. Towards the right a vast mass 
of wall blocked the sky. 

The mass of wall took shape and outline. 
The curves of a noble tower abutting from an 
outer wall of masonry defined themselves 
broadly, solidly, yet with a singular grace and 
symmetry. The tower was Talbot's Tower 
and the mass of wall was the great fortress — 
the Chateau of Falaise. 

The nearer walls of low-browed houses were 
soon closing in about us, shutting out that 
momentary glimpse of Normandy's famous 
stronghold. 

The street we were following, and those we 
looked into sideways, presented a captivating 
jumble of closely packed houses, of gardens 



48 FALAISE 

tumbling down steep hills, and of villas and 
chateaux aslant upon verdant declivities. 

All hill-towns are potent fascinators. Fal- 
aise has a charm peculiar to its site. Boat- 
shaped, it rode the valleys on either side as a 
ship parts the sea. The billows of the green 
hillsides pressed and yet were parted from the 
long keel-shaped cliff. 

The farmers and grooms behind and about 
our wheels had not come to Falaise, however, 
for the purpose of commenting on its shape. 
Presently they made the same known to us. 

" He! la-bas! On ne sarrete pas comme fa — 
One does n't block the road like that on a Fair 
day! " and whips were cracked about our ears 
with a meaning in their snap. We used our 
own whip, in sign of our penitence. 

Crowded indeed was the square and the 
street leading upwards to our inn. Peasants, 
jockeys, townspeople, and the horses — hun- 
dreds of the latter — swarmed from surrounding 
side streets, swelling the groups of those already 
over-running the narrow Rue d' Argentan. 

The cries and shouts were deafening. Horses 
felt the contagion of the noise — their neighing 




'^ 



FALAISE — STREET SCENES 



51 



and whinnying blent with the throaty treble of 
some donkeys doing chorus work. The crowd 
being a French crowd, that everybody should 
be talking at once made the human chatter 
seem only the more homely and familiar. 

Above, from ... 
the low-browed 
houses, women's 
heads were lean- 
ing forth as per- 
ilously pushed 
forwards as the 
gargoyles that 
had grinned at us 
from the cornice 
of St. Gervais, 
the church in the 
square. Below 

the house-eaves flags were flying. Every small- 
est cafe and estaminet was doing its one great 
business of the year. Those peasants already 
seated at the little tables, in the gathering 
twilight, sipping their " sou de cafe " or their 
absinthe, were the fortunate ones, for they had 
come early and had thus secured good places. 




The Square of St. Gervais. 



52 



FALAISE 



The shops lining the long high street were 
small ; yet were they profuse in window in- 
vitations after the manner of provincial shops; 
and all of these, also, were obviously doing a 

roaring trade — 
the one great 
week's trade of 
all the sleepy 
year. Buyers in 
shiny blouses; 
women in thick 
black worsted 
gowns caught at 
the back in a 
wedge of gath- 
ers, suggestive 
of past but not 
A street Scene. forgotten far- 

thingale fash- 
ions ; women in bonnets ; women in caps ; or, 
best of all, wearing their own thick coil of 
braids; children that were smaller copies of the 
new conventionalized peasant types, all of these, 
ruddy of face, eager-eyed, serious-browed, some 
laughing and chattering like magpies, others 




FALAISE — STREET SCENES 53 

chewing the cud of their stolidity abroad as at 
home, such were the figures composing the 
groups of the crowds that made progress a difH- 
cult art in that narrow, people-packed street. 

Horses' heads were almost as thickly grouped 
about the tiny cafe tables as were their farmer- 
owners' caps and blouses. Men bent from the 
backs of restive Percherons afoam with sweat, 
to cry out, lustily: 

" He ! la-bas ! le sou de cafe — 'vec cognac — 
entends-tu ? Hey — I say — ha'pennyworth of 
coffee, and brandy — do you hear ? " 

Gay were the greetings interchanged be- 
tween the new-comers, the townsfolk, and the 
sippers of the long drinks. These latter were 
seated comfortably, as if for the week's enter- 
tainment, at the crowded tables. Only the 
horses were restive and impatient. About their 
pointed ears whips were cracked, but from a 
purely scenic sense of effect, as any one might 
see, and as none knew better than the powerful 
cobs and stallions, whose muscles were aquiver 
from other causes than those born of fear. 

That gossip, however, must be made to yield 
up its last secret, was more important, even, 



54 FALAISE 

than that the horses should be put to bed. 
Jean of St. L6 could not be parted, even for a 
half hour from Marthe-of-the-Doves'-Eyes at 
Falaise, till all the surprises of the year had 
been rehearsed. How Henri had died, and 
how little he left; how all the Etiennes had 
quarrelled before le vieux was fairly cold in his 
winding sheet ; how Nicolas had got the better 
of Paul in the great law-suit ; who had n't mar- 
ried whom, and what the wrong brides' dots 
were — and certain other still more amazing 
facts pertaining to the much-wished-for increase 
of France's population, but in ways reprehensi- 
ble — without benefit of clero^v — such were 
the histories of human frailty, success and dis- 
appointment that the peasants on horseback 
told to those lolling at their ease on the side- 
walk, — and to the strangers within the gates. 

The noise of the crowded little thoroughfare 
followed us to our inn. Its courtyard was 
aswarm with visitors. There was a discourag- 
ingly dense pack of vehicles of all sorts and 
shapes, and centuries, ranged against the side- 
walks. Also, the inn stables were full, the 
hostler affirmed. His tone was one of deep 



FALAISE -STREET SCENES 55 

reproach. As if all Calvados — all France in- 
deed, did not know that the Falaise inns — 
and of all its inns, this one, its pride, — were 
filled to bursting this week of the Fair ! 

'' Pour les chambres, — ah, out/ As for the 
rooms of monsieur, yes, they are ready, we 
can show him up at once. Happily, monsieur 
secured them in time. But, pour le cheval, 
mon Dieu, monsieur, — il y a bien des chevaux 
qui dormiront a la belle etoile cette nuity 

It was indeed at the sign of the Beautiful 
Star that our valiant little steed put up for the 
night, as we found on the morrow, when it 
took no less a force than all the stable yard 
could muster to catch the gay reveller who, in 
love with his vasty green chamber, had taken 
a notion to explore his domain. 



CHAPTER VII 

TO THE FAIR GROUNDS 

THE sun, the next morning, had obviously 
risen with the knowledge of what was 
expected of him. Never did a Fair day wear 
a more festal aspect. The inn courtyard was 
as gay as if tricked out in pure gold. Every- 
thing shone, glittered, glistened, or sparkled. 
The groups of peasants sitting under the bright 
arbors, dipping their bread in their chicory, 
called coffee, were obviously under the spell of 
the fine morning. Good humor, and a genu- 
ine holiday spirit were abroad in the air. 

The cries of hostlers and coachmen ; the 
stamping of coach-horses, reeking with sweat, 
from their long, cross-country run ; the loud 
calls for coffee from the coach owners ; more 
carts and hooded gigs following fast upon the 
coach, — such were the cries and the scene we 
left behind us in the little courtyard, as we 



TO THE FAIR GROUNDS 57 

made our way up to the high street, on our 
way to the Fair grounds. 

It is at Guibray, an old-time suburb of Falaise 
that the Fair has been held these ten centuries 
or more. Now so completely a part of the 
town as to be practically indistinguishable from 
it, yet does Guibray, with peculiar antique 
pride, unknown in modern suburban districts, 
maintain its separateness. 

The old town, in the soft August light was 
aflam.e with colors and contrasts. Above the 
Eastern note bright awnings give to all the 
streets, the blazing crudities of colored signs, 
of dressed and undressed figures on the posters 
carried the eye upward to the tender grays of 
sloping roofs. Under the stone gabled win- 
dows were the usual high-perched gardens on 
the edges of the sills. The morning light was 
rioting in swinging vines, nasturtiums, and the 
merry geraniums. 

From some of the richly moulded old win- 
dows rustic attempts at decorative effects were 
visible. Flags, rugs, bits of fine linen, were 
hung from wrought-iron balustrades, or from 
stone window ledges. Cotton caps, however, 



^8 FALAISE 

topping thickly wrinkled old faces, were the 
most popular Falaisian decoration. What 
countless generations of just such faces had 
looked forth from these sixteenth and seven- 
teenth century houses to watch the peasants, 
merchants, jockeys, and noblemen go up to the 
Fair at Guibray ! 

Although the present procession moving up 
to the Place aux Chevaux was but a very poor 
show indeed, compared to what these experi- 
enced old houses had seen, in the great days of 
the Fair, the crowd and the town, on that 
August morning, tricked one into the convic- 
tion that this last year of our dying century 
was not all dull commonplace. 

Look where one would, as one moved on- 
ward, there was a picture for the eyes. The 
vistas opening out through the courtyards 
made dazzling perspectives, with the sun rays 
focussing on brassy saucepans or mounds of 
hay. From a cluster of low shop windows the 
eye suddenly took a plunge of a hundred or 
two feet downwards to light on a stately cha- 
teau with well-groomed parterres and correctly 
trimmed trees. 



TO THE FAIR GROUNDS 59 

Of such aspects of the old town, there was 
barely time for more than a glance, for the stir 
and impetus of the crowd of horses and peas- 
ants kept us swiftly moving onwards. 

The horses were everywhere. They dashed 
out of courtyards, their morning spirits far too 
much for the peasant owners and grooms to 
manage. Large, small, old and young, not a 
creature on four feet but seemed to know it to 
be their own peculiar day. If ever horses 
proved they knew how^ to celebrate their own 
festivity, these prancing, curvetting, dancing 
horses did on their way to their Fair. 

Humanly conscious they seemed, and as 
sensible as any of the two-footed, to the conta- 
gion of motion precipitated by their own pro- 
digious activity. They made light of their 
bright halters. As for the curb, they laughed 
it to scorn. Dancing was what this morning 
was made for. To take a few steps along a 
forbidden stretch of sidewalk, or to polka inno- 
cently but perilously close to a timid china 
merchant's shop, or to waltz gayly toward an 
appetizing array of pastry with only a shining 
window pane for protection — even staid and 



6o 



FALAISE 



sober Percherons were not proof against such 
temptations as these on such a day. Only the 
old, the rheumatic, the blind, or the lame, went 
staidly up to take their stands about the square. 




The Apse of the Norjnan Church of A^otre Dauie 
de Guibray. 

A sharp turn into a side street brought us to 
the great surprise of the day. 

To hear that a horse fair is held in a 
square before a church awakens no particular 
thirst of curiosity to behold the same. We 
banquet daily on facts drawn from a world 
whose strangeness and romance are served up 



TO THE FAIR GROUNDS 63 

to US with our morning coffee. The eye 
has, however, preserved a certain freshness of 
vision. Sup though we may on horrors, no 
man can look upon either a striking novelty or 
a hideous crime without learning the great 
truth that the seeing eye remains perennially 
young in point of impressionability. 

The scene before us was set with a naive 
disregard of appropriateness. A Norman- 
Gothic church stood solidly erect upon the 
hill of Guibray. Its Gothic apse fronted a 
wide suburban street. On either side, the 
richly carved pinnacles topping the bold 
buttresses w^ere set about with decorative 
roofs and antique-faced houses. Architect- 
urally, town and church made an harmoni- 
ous blend. It was on and below the wide 
parvis that a strange and wholly novel scene 
made church and town play but a secondary 
role. 

On a great square below the noble Norman 
fabric thousands of horses were tethered, were 
held in leash, or were springing into motion. 
Gray, white, mottled, brown, and black hides 
shone in the August sun like unworn satin. 



64 FALAISE 

Hundreds of men moved in and out among 
this army of horses. 

Up to the very church walls the merchants 
had planted their merchandise. To long 
wooden poles hundreds of horses were teth- 
ered. Sheds were built so close to the but- 
tressed sides that their stretched canvases 
seemed an integral part of the whole. 

The lovely structure was, indeed, the pivotal 
point about which centred all the stir and 
whirl of the Fair. Horses' necks were as 
close about the iron railings as berries on a 
stalk; across their backs a child might have 
walked and come to no harm, so tightly wedged 
were the flanks that stood ranged in line, fac- 
ing the church's walls. The church itself, so 
far from being held aloof from this scene of 
barter and sale, was very much a part of the 
whole performance, so to speak. Its gable end 
and Gothic porch were festooned with gar- 
lands. Across its gray-faced walls scarlet 
cloths hung loose to the caprice of the wind. 
Flagstaffs were planted in the flying buttresses, 
and the Tricolor wound and unwound its 
flexible coils about the lace of Gothic finials. 



TO THE FAIR GROUNDS 65 

This festal note of color, we learned later, had 
been a part of the decorations in honor of the 
installation of the new parish cure. It was 
greatly to the advantage of the picturesque 
ensemble that the parish had delayed the re- 
moval of the firs and bunting. 

This note of festivity was, indeed, clearly the 
accepted key in which were set the graver com- 
mercial transactions. These sober Normans 
had not walked or driven hundreds of miles to 
go to a Mass. Even in an ordinary horse trade 
a joyous note goes always along with the bar- 
o^ainino^. In such transactions some one is 
certain to have profited at his brother's ex- 
pense. Men are still singularly naive in their 
prompt instinctive impulse to celebrate such a 
victory. Here at Guibray, for the whole of a 
week, horse-trading and buying were in the 
very air, — was it a matter of wonderment 
that laughter and merriment crowded out even 
crabbed Norman greed } 

The great square was as gay as a bridal. 
But a fair is better than a w^edding ; it is more 
to the Norman taste. Long slow talks ; long 
slow bargains ; above all, long slow drinks 



66 FALAISE 

— these are the processes best suited to the 
keen, yet careful Norman wits, and to their 
deeply-veined sensuousness. 

In these earlier days of the Fair, the friend- 
lier, gayer aspects of peasant life and character 
were the more obvious presentments. Every 
one was in high, good humor. The bright, 
clear skies, the sparkling-eyed, ruddy-cheeked 
girls and women; the eager dashing horses; 
the cheers and toasts ringing up from the cafe 
tables encircling the Fair grounds ; — all these 
elements contributed to a general feeling of 
high enjoyment. 

As we moved in and out about the groups, 
a certain elation, an extraordinarily agreeable 
sense of pleasurable excitement grew up with- 
in. Imperceptibly one's own identity was lost ; 
one became a part of the scene, an actor 
among actors, partisan of all the magnificent 
statements made or refuted in the teeth of the 
splendid merchandise walking about on four 
feet. 

Each group of men and horses represented 
a different variety of man and horse. No two 
were alike ; they were as infinite in present- 



TO THE FAIR GROUNDS 67 

ment of composite qualities as only heredity 
and selection can break up and re-set the 
human and animal types. 

Out of the inextricable mass one beean to 
discern signs of a certain rude order in the 
proceedings. Out on the square, above the 
long balustrades, tall posts were planted ; on 
these latter wooden squares were nailed. 
There were signs bearing the words "Saddle 
Horses," " Brittany Horses," " Normandy 
Horses," etc. Beneath the posts the horses of 
each class were grouped. 

One could thus pass in review and at one's 
leisure the several unique breeds of horseflesh 
classified under the distinctive heads of the 
Anglo-Norman and the pure Normandy horse. 
One could trace even the effects of cross- 
breeding — go from stock to stock, comparing, 
criticising, w^eighing faults and qualities. 

The three most prominent groups were the 
three varieties of horseflesh bred and raised 
in the Normandy stud farms and pastures : 
the Norman horse — the ideal carriage and 
saddle horse ; the cheval Breton — reared in 
the moist pastures close to Brittany, bought 



68 FALAISE 

not only by the French Government but by 
German and Italian officers, for artillery pur- 
poses ; and certain crossed varieties of the 
Norman draught horse and mare that furnish 
the omnibus and tramway companies of Paris 
with their best and most lasting " bussers." 
Of these varieties there were thousands from 
which to choose. The Percherons, whose very 
name stands as a synonym for the king of all 
draught horses, were to be traced in all stages 
of youth, age, and decay. At every turning 
of the glance the eyes would light upon the 
scene familiarized to all the world by Rosa 
Bonheur's masterly presentment of Percherons 
in full action, ridden by peasant grooms ; pic- 
tures instinct with high animality of stir and 
motion, luminous in color, and as rich in 
contrast of grouping as the groups were in- 
finite in attraction. 



CHAPTER VIII 

HORSE-TRADING 

DOCILE as were, for the most part, this 
vast concourse of horses, once released 
from the imprisoning chain or rope, and their 
mettle showed itself. The square of the bald 
earth was everywhere sending up light clouds 
of dust raised by prancing, rushing, trotting 
horses. 

A magnificent stallion, kicking up the dust 
behind his clean hoofs, was carrying a peasant 
groom hanging on the rope-bridle, along with 
an irresistible rush. 

Some women from upper windows laughed 
down upon the lad and his frantic efforts to 
keep his feet upon the ground. Two serious 
peasants, briskly walking, talking as they 
quickened their pace, had only eyes for the 
splendid creature, as he swept along, his mus- 
cles all in play. 



70 



FALAISE 



Grooms in scarlet or green vests, with gaudy 
neckties, — the uniform of the national stud, — 
were astride of glossy-skinned beasts whose 
quieter-trained paces were being judged by 

smartish buyers 
in top hats and 
white waist- 
coats. 

At every turn- 
ing of the glance, 
sudden breaks 
were being made 
by men away 
from the central 
groups. Lads 
with open shirts, 
showing bronzed 
sinewy necks, 
and faces aflame 
with excitement, would throw a leg across a 
horse's back only to find themselves astride his 
neck, or over it. To the shouting chorus of 
rude laughter, the rope-rein would be seized 
anew, and once again the amateur jockey would 
strive to hold his seat. 




Some Buyers. 



HORSE- TRA DING 7 I 

Into these short trial trips the horses them- 
selves entered as if with conscious zest of 
energy. Before the short rider's whip could 
touch them, they were off, their movements full 
of life, their impetuous dashes into by-streets 
and the upper and smaller square bringing into 
play all their spirit and muscular power. 

Stout, serious-browed men in long driving- 
coats were in thick groups about the rows of 
horses whose giant flanks and rich fetlocks 
proved their Percheron breeding. The cheval 
Breton — the Brittany horses — and the Per- 
cherons were the coveted prizes, not only for 
French buyers, but for export. 

Two fair-haired Swedes were liftine the 
great hoofs and pulling down the lips of two 
Brittany colts, whose mottled gray hides shone 
like figured satin in the noon sun. Some 
French officers in uniform, their waxed mous- 
taches high in air, had the nonchalant ease 
of saunterers, as they passed from group to 
group of the tethered beasts. 

" They are going to buy, later, for the Gov- 
ernment," we heard it whispered as we passed 
them. 



72 FALAISE 

Some Italians were unmistakable purchasers; 
a half-dozen Bretons were being put through 
their paces, while the two gentlemen — possi- 
bly from Verona — so far forgot to wear the 
thin disguise of their atrocious French as to 
turn critic in their own fluent tongue. Close 
to these latter were the buyers of one of the 
great French tramway companies, and about 
these there circled an ever-thickening group of 
bloused farmers and horse-raisers. 

A brigandish-looking individual, of generous 
girth, with piercing black eyes, was telling 
two shrewd, clever-faced Normans that they 
were trying to make him party to a " sale 
affaire'' — to a "nasty bargain." The " bar- 
srain " was a strinsf of Percheron colts as hand- 
some a looking lot of cattle as any among the 
four thousand. The gentleman from the Midi 
had that talent for using words imaginatively 
which is the gift of the brothers of Tartarin. 

" There 's a horse for you — grand action — 
that ! and reliable — I tell you — an infant in 
arms could ride him ! " a peasant close by us 
was saying, with quiet pride in the noble brute 
his peasant groom was trotting past us — the 



HORSE- TRADING 



n 



latter's loose shirt ballooning behind him, as 
the steed dashed round a street corner. 

" You want something quiet to drive in 
single or double harness ? Come this way, my 




This luaj/, my friend.'' 



friend — par ici, nion ami — I have the very 
thing — young — strong — solide ! Ah, mats 
je voMS le dis, moi — flanks like oak " and the 
gentlemanly-looking Norman, whose blouse 
seemed worn as a mask for disguising his 
opulent state of body and presumably of purse, 



74 



FALAISE 



swept his customer up the low incline towards 
a row of horses tethered beneath the western 
church porch. The horse shown, we re- 
marked, seemed not to belie the owner's praise 
of him. 

But there were others. There were long 
rows of martyrs — the martyrs of this and 
countless other seasons. About such groups, 
we noted fewer buyers and a degree of elo- 
quence and a passion of protestation un- 
matched elsewhere. 

"That horse spavined — and blows — you 
say — votis me dites cela, vous ? Sucre no7n de 
but I will show you if he is an accor- 
dion ! " and the maligned mare was quickly 
mounted. 

"Go, ma belle — go then — and show to the 
world thy lungs of an elephant " and the mare 
with the elephantine lungs breathed soft as 
any sucking dove — for a good five minutes' 
run. Then, when she began to play her ac- 
cordion tunes, her wary Norman turned actor. 
He brought his beast to a sharp halt, as he 
mopped the drops of moisture from his clever 
brow. 



HORSE-TRADING 75 

"She's been sold five times already — and 
returned as often," smiled a squat, cross-eyed 
peasant at my elbow. 

" She must make a good deal of money for 
her owner." 

"I believe you — she is better than a bank 
balance, that one," and the squat shoulders 
shook their laughter in the teeth of the money- 
making mare. A few minutes later we found 
our critic himself in the full frenzy of a sale. 
He was pointing to a horse in the last stages 
of decay. 

"Done for — this one! He is as strong as 
an ox, I tell you. Underfed, perhaps, I grant 
you — je 7te vous dis pas non — and then I 've 
been making him work a bit, but sick, never! 
Au grand jamais ! He will never have an 
illness — this one ! " Never but one — my 
friend — only one, before dying of old age 
and starvation. 

A group of Lilliputian asses, with bright 
bits of scarlet and yellow in their bridles were 
tethered away from the main mass of horses — 
to balustrades placed close to the house fronts. 
As they swung their tiny heads, the bells they 



76 FALAISE 

wore rang in rude unison. Their keeper was 
a striking figure among the florid, roseate-hued 
Normans with their sombre blouses. Over a 
bright-colored vest and loose jacket, the hand- 
some lad wore a light cloak. In his pale gray 
felt, of sombrero breadth of rim, a gay feather 
was stuck, and his rusty brown stockings were 
laced to the knee with rope-lacings. When 
the Proven9al " Ze-Ze " ricochetted his bas- 
tard French, it needed not the boy's rich eye 
tints and swarthy skin to betray his southern 
heritage. 

" He 's from Marseilles — he comes every 
year," an innkeeper announced pompously 
from his arched doorway — to let us know 
the Fair drew men from the ends of the 
earth. 

" Does he drive the creatures — les betes — up 
here ? " 

" Dieii que non ! they come by train — they 
are like sheep for goodness." 

Away rang the bells of the Midi, from the 
asses' necks, in a merry jingle, as if chorussing 
their Te Deum of thanks at the invention of 
steam that makes of long journeys a single 



HORSE- TRA DING 7 7 

night of travel. Their driver changed his 
posture, from a standing on one laced leg to 
the other, threw back his handsome head, and 
turned his disdainful eye on the crowds circ- 
ling about the horses. The eye of the Midi 
is a speaking eye. And that dark orb from 
Marseilles said, as loud as if its speech had 
been a blast through a trumpet, that men who 
bought horses instead of asses were no better 
than mules. 

A fair young keeper of a group of asses and 
donkeys who had taken her stand somewhat 
away from the crowd was a more successful 
vendor. The quiet self-possessed grace of 
this girl whose merchandise lay in donkeys 
would have made her a success in other 
and higher places than her improvised stall 
against a hedge-row. There were buyers 
in plenty about the quiet group. When 
we passed her, a little before high noon, she 
was making her last entry. She had sold her 
lot. 

" Where are they going, did you ask, 
Madame ? To , near Paris, to the Res- 
taurant in the Tree. Parisians like that, it 



78 



FALAISE 



appears — a donkey-ride before dinner is a 
good digestive" — and she snapped her silver- 
mounted account book. Still she smiled as 
she laid her light whip across her donkey's 




A Sale of Donkeys. 

back — for there was another question we 
could not forbear asking. 

" And where do I go now ? Oh ! for more 
donkeys — nous faisons toutes les f aires — we 
go to all the Fairs — till the season is over — 
allons, la, — What are you about .r^" The whip 



HORSE-TRADING 79 

came down on an over-ambitious donkey's 
back, whose gormandizing instinct had led 
him into a near garden, — with the sure 
touch of one who knew the one raw spot 
and how^ to find it. 



CHAPTER IX 

WOMEN VENDORS 

WOMEN were to be met, indeed, all over 
the Fair, and as much at home as if in 
their own barnyard or kitchen. 

In this great Republic of women, where the 
sex for centuries has acquired, through the 
most venerable of laws — that of custom — 
the right to transact any business or to sell 
any article or object sold by men, not a Fair 
in France but proclaims the equality of the 
sexes. In the Horse Fair at Guibray every 
right — except some of those granted bylaw 
— demanded for woman by her suffragist sis- 
ters elsewhere, is hers. She has won and holds 
her place down among the horses. 

There were a dozen or more horse-traders — 
of the so-called weaker sex, in among the 
groups of horses and men at the Fair. 

Just why a passion among women for a rais- 
ing and selling of horseflesh should tend to 



WOMEN VENDORS 8 1 

the growth of a formidable pair of moustaches 
I know not. Yet even their own horses hardly 
dared to look these hirsute ladies in the eye. 
Perhaps for the same reason their peasant hus- 
bands wore a saddened, deprecatory air. 

These feminine dealers in horseflesh had 
not put aside all their women's wiles, however, 
when they took the whip in hand. 

A jolly-faced Proven9al, who was on the 
look-out for a good " carter " was seized upon 
by a short squat peasant, whose muslin cap 
and woman's skirts alone proclaimed her sex 
— until she spoke. Then she was twice a 
woman — for she was French. 

" Ah ! monsieur — here you are — at last ! 
I have been waiting for you. No, I would not 
sell — although they have been pestering me 
all the morning ! No, I said — I await Mon- 
sieur Gaspaud, from the South — he knows a 
good thing when he sees it — and here, mon- 
sieur, here is your horse! Ah ! what do you 
think of that, hein ? Strong enough, I hope — 
look at the power of him ! what shoulders ! 
hey } — and flanks } and his coat — where do 
vou find a coat like that } And vices — not 



82 FA LAIS E 

one! It is I — I myself who have bred him 
for you. Ah monsieur ! but it breaks the 
heart to part with a horse like that ! " 

Then was the comedy of sentiment played 
out to its finisli. A stout checkered handker- 
chief was produced ; a resounding blast w^as 
skilfully managed, and the tw^o ferret eyes were 
conscientiously wiped of a moisture which 
might indeed have surprised them — had it 
been there. 

The Proven9al was only a man. He walked 
away with the horse. 

A sister trader joined the happy saleswoman. 
" And so you got rid of your gelding ? " 

" Yes, and a good thing it was, too — I 've 
been blistering him this fortnight." The two 
laughed above their coarse homespun aprons, 
their muslin caps nodding in concert, as their 
tall whips shook in their vein-ribbed hands. 

In sharp contrast to this scene, with its sug- 
gestive Teniers coarseness and humor, was 
another of the true modern high-life genre. 

Into our inn courtyard, one noon, a smart 
cart rattled. The spirited little cob had been 
skilfully reined in at just the right instant 



WOMEN VENDORS 83 

to prevent collision with an officer in uniform 
whose mount was less amenable to discipline 
than that of the new-comer. An upward 
glance of the lady whip — and her lips parted. 
As she smiled her recognition, she leaned for- 
ward across her dashboard. 

''Quelle chance — bon Dieu, quelle chance I 
Figurez-vous — imagine to yourself — cher 
capitaine, that I drove over this morning — 
yes — all the way from Benonville. Matinale? 
At dawn, I tell you, at dawn I rose — to 
p:et to this wretched fair — and for what, 
if you please, but just this! To find you — 
yes — you, and to have you pick me out a 
saddle-horse. Mine has gone lame — I broke 
his knee, I fear, the other day, at Deauville. I 
heard there were some fine mares for sale here 

from Monsieur A 's stud-farm — and here 

I am ! 

The lady had sprung to the ground, had put 
her whip in its socket, had caressed her veil to 
rights, and shaken hands with her captain, — 
all at one and the same instant — as it seemed. 

In the same instant she had discovered our 
own little group, and was soon a part of it. 



84 FA LA IS E 

What? — we also had come all the way from 
Dives, and not even to buy horses — merely to 
see them? Tiens ! — it appeared that this 
Horse Fair was worth seeing, after all? How 
had we over there in America (the " over 
there " was done with a gesture which relegated 
America to the beyond-of-the-grave) how had 
we ever manao:ed to hear of the Fair of Gui- 
bray? Astonishing, simply astounding — we 
Americans! She thereupon gave us a facial 
proof, by the lifting of her expressive, finely- 
curved eyebrows, and a widening of her large 
eyes, of the mental effort within to conceive 
of such folly as ours being committed by a 
Frenchman — much less by a Frenchwoman. 

With a grace that revealed centuries of 
charming ancestresses trained to the art, she 
proceeded to make use of our inconceivable 
folly — and the experience gained by it. 

Would we show her the Fair? Would we 
really take her in among all those horses, and 
peasants, and grooms ? Were we sure it was 
not dangerous ? Not too unbearably dirty ? 
Dieu I what a frolic ! She proceeded promptly 
to thank the good God for having inspired her 



WOMEN VENDORS 85 

to get up at dawn, for having prompted her 
to be sufficiently audacious to take that long 
drive across country, just because she knew 
Captain X. was stationed here and bought 
horses for the Government — and therefore 
might be trusted to help her pick out a good 
jumper. 

The lady and the laces of her salmon pink 
petticoats made the tour of the Fair in safety. 
It was after the noon breakfast we in our turn 
were taken to see the buying of her hunter. 

For the best thoroughbreds, as a rule, one 
must go further than Falaise ; one must go as 
far north as Dozule, to the stud-farm of Mon- 
sieur le Monnier, or to the famous racing stables 
of Monsieur Aumont at Victot, near Dives. 
In these and other stud-farms in Normandy 
many of the horses are raised which are the 
future race-winners at Chantilly, at Auteuil, 
and Longchamps. Some Norman thorough- 
bred mares and stallions are, however, shown 
at Guibray. These choice animals are not, 
quite naturally, to be found among the com- 
mon groups. One is taken to view such with 
a certain degree of ceremony. 



86 FALAISE 

A smart groom piloted our party away from 
the noise and dust of the Fair ground down 
a quiet by-street to a more or less distant and 
more or less private stable. Here in a large 
commodious stall we were shown a remarkably 
beautiful mare — a thoroughbred hunter, win- 
ner of a prize for jumping. The lady of the 
chateau, after a masterly investigation of the 
mare's points, bought her on the spot. 

" Buying a horse is like getting married — 
if you find what you like — seize it at once. If 
you hesitate, you are lost," was the lady's 
laughing rejoinder to the Captain's comment 
on her precipitancy. 




Q 
^ 



?2 

2 



I 



^ 



CHAPTER X 

THE FAIR OF BOOTHS 

^ I "^HE lady of the chateau was in no sense 
J- a remarkable figure at the Fair, except 
in so far as a beautiful woman is always re- 
markable and remarked. 

The streets early in the morning were full 
of carts filled with knick-knacks, or piled high 
with farm products, trundled by women. 

Great families of women of a Biblical strength 
in numbers filled chars-a-bancs to overflowing. 
Once near the Fair, the women could be seen 
thriftily turning into a side street towards the 
open meadows. Here, in a friendly field, the 
cart would be swung, siding up to other carts, 
one of the younger w^omen springing dow^n to 
hold the restive horse or mare, as old and 
young dismounted. Then did the Norman 
peasant woman show the skill and power that 
come with the hard labor of a farm. The 



go FALAISE 

horse was unharnessed in a jiffy; the cart rolled 
closer to the others as if it were a bunch of 
feathers; — one girl going for a bucket of water, 
while others took out the bas; of oats, the 
bundles of hay, — for, at the inn yonder, there 
must be nothing to pay for the horse's keep 
save the two sous for his stall. 

Up beyond the church and its Place aiix 
Chevatix, at the top of the hill, where the Fair 
booths are placed — it was there the women 
were to be seen in their greatest force. Among 
the dealers in china-ware, in cheap laces, and 
cheaper silks, in under-wear, and in those 
thousand and one Qrimcrack absurdities whose 
chief and sole uses appear to lie in making 
modern fairs as tawdry as most of the articles 
offered for sale are valueless, the saleswomen 
outnumbered the men ten to one. 

Old faces there were, whose sallow skins 
were ripened to a brighter orange by the snow 
of the white cotton caps. Wrinkled as crum- 
pled leaves though some of these women's 
faces and hands might be, strong and sono- 
rous would be the voice through which, above 
the din and hubbub, you were appealingly in- 




"^ the slice, Madame.''^ 



THE FAIR OF BOOTHS 93 

formed that you could buy your melon by the 
slice. 

''A la coupe — a la coupe, Madame, — by 
the slice — by the slice, Madame! Where are 
such slices to be had ? " 

In among these groups of booths, the hub- 
bub and din were of another order of sound 
than those to be heard on the church square. 
The noise was shriller, the voices being chiefly 
soprani. Along with this lighter quality of 
tone one felt a more debonair spirit of gayety 
abroad beneath these striped awnings and 
huge scarlet umbrellas. The selling of cheap 
silk remnants from the great Lyons ware- 
houses, or of butter and eggs, are acts not so 
fraught with possibility of tragic surprises as 
is the buying of horses. Even the officers 
regained their spirited gayety of step when 
buying Egyptian cigarettes of a fez-hatted 
Greek from Paris. 

Every article of consumption a farm can 
produce was temptingly spread out beneath the 
sheds and huge umbrellas. Women pointed 
to their geese with the pride of expert raisers ; 
the merits of cheeses were sung in no uncer- 



94 FALAISE 

tain notes ; roses and milk were offered under 
the same stall by girls whose creamy complex- 
ions seemed served up as a natural advertise- 
ment ; and as for the mountains of eggs 
offered and the rashers of bacon, in this one 
Fair alone, there must have been enough of 
such to have fed all Normandy. 

How can one hope to give the best part of 
the Fair? — the strong dominant human note 
— the groups of peasants that gathered and 
broke, only to re-form elsewhere ? the laughter, 
the greetings, — the exchange between two 
sun-dyed faces of the thrice-given Norman 
kiss ? the strange oddities of sound in the 
crossing of the various patois jargon, that 
kept its bass and treble high above the groan 
of tied calves, and the protesting cackle of 
hens in bondage ? 

One huge peasant, whose width of girth 
made his crisp purple blouse take about a 
certain region of his body, the shape of a 
bandage, was tendering for sale some tame 
bullfinches in a cage the size of a mouse-trap. 
Close to him, a widow, in a long crepe veil, 
and a bonnet modelled on approved Parisian 



THE FAIR OF BOOTHS 95 

Bon Marche styles, felt no sense of incongruity 
in the holding of a pendent rabbit in one 
hand, and two captive hens in the other. Be- 
sides her merchandise, she had brought her 
family cares to market. 

"What — au 120m dii don Dieu — am I to 
do with a tiresome little ragamuffin, who, at 
daylight, is off with all the gars of the town, 
smoking cigarettes, if you please ! " 

She asked the question of a neighbor in 
short homespun skirts and a white cotton cap. 
Her answer came from a handsome, flirtatious- 
eyed peasant, whose blue scarf w^as tied with a 
courting jauntiness above his neat blouse. In 
her case, the days of distressed widowhood 
seemed numbered. 

The August sun, meanwhile, was as ardent 
as ever. He poured the strength of his glance, 
unhindered, on maiden lip and velvet throat. 
The warmth of his midsummer caress was un- 
wittingly confessed in the more provocative 
swing of full hips, and in laughter that sung 
itself into raptures of content. In this Fair 
of booths, Cupid was making the most of 
what was left of the summer — as he w^as at 



96 



FA LA IS E 



other fairs held weekly at Caen, Dives, Dozule, 

and a hundred other Norman towns and villages. 

This Fair of booths and awnings has its 




A Scene at the Fair of Booths. 

counterparts in France from the boulevards 
bleached by the suns of Provence to the sea- 
washed hamlets and towns of Upper Normandy. 
One may see everywhere the same cheap assort- 



THE FAIR OF BOOTHS 97 

ment of wearing apparel and earthenware ; the 
same admixture of farm products and German 
absurdities ; hear the same braying of the 
hurdy-gurdies attached to the same revolving 
wooden horses, and watch the same gypsy carts 
outside the Fair grounds sending forth their 
" strong men " and their " queens of the rope " 
in tights and gold-fringed velvets, which the 
sun cruelly strips of their last vestige of illu- 
sion. But that for which the Fair of Guibray 
is chiefly remarkable — apart from its horse 
show — is not to be found elsewhere. 

Nowhere else, in all France, have I seen 
such nobly built men — men of such stature, 
such strength and length of limb, and such 
breadth of girth; nor faces at once so healthful 
and so full of those forces which make for 
character building. Turn where one would — 
to the groups circulating in and about the 
horses : or to the long inn tables set upon the 
narrow sidewalks — and filled again and again 
with hungry peasants eager for the noon meal ; 
whether one looked upon the lusty lads ripen- 
ing to early manhood, as much men at eigh- 
teen, as never will be the puny Parisian at 

7 



98 FALAISE 

thirty ; or whether one lifted the eyes to en- 
counter serious-eyed, massively built farmers, 
in the full flush of life's tide — wherever one 
looked or turned, it was to see the strength of 
France before one. Here are the men who, 
again and again, have given Europe its sur- 
prises ; who, centuries ago, went forth — they 
and their horses — to start a new race across 
the seas and, so persistent was and is their 
type, that here one still may see the parent 
stock from which was struck the image of 
Eno^land's Ens^lishmen. 

Along the coast the Norman peasant has 
largely lost his individuality of aspect. The 
obliterating finger of contact with many men 
of many worlds has smoothed away his more 
distineuishino: characteristics. In these re- 
moter districts, where Norman habits, customs, 
and traditions, are as inrooted as are its giant 
oaks and beeches, the peasant is still the 
brother of those hardy sires of the stalwart race 
of farmers and yeomen that have given to Eng- 
land its mighty arm of power. 




A Typical Nomian 



LofC. 



CHAPTER XI 



SOME NIGHT SCENES 



TN among these groups of peasants there 
-*- were certain faces and figures one seemed 
to have met elsewhere. These familiar coun- 
tenances were at times to be seen bending over 
a horse's hoof, peering, with an absent air, into 
a veteran Percheron's mouth, or one met them 
at nearer quarters, toasting half boozy peasants 
at the cafe tables. 

Rakishly dressed, masquerading as English- 
men on their travels; or less conspicuous in 
the blouse of a horse-breeder or in the gayly 
striped vest of the jockey, whatever the assumed 
garb or costume, — here was the world of 
swindlers come down to Falaise. 

Since time immemorial they have gathered 
here, we learned. The Fair, in its great his- 
toric days, was full of gypsies and acrobats, 
who, when not professionally engaged, em- 



I02 FALAISE 

ployed their leisure in counterfeiting gentle- 
men riders in search of a good mount or naive 
peasants on the look-out for a gay half-hour. 

After three days of horse trading, the most 
ascetic of farmers relaxes the austerity of his 
habits. After the hard bargains comes the 
hard drinking. This is the moment patiently 
awaited by the black band — ''la bande noireT 

To lure a peasant to one of the darker, 
dimmer cafes, on the pretence of closing the 
sale talked over in bright light of day; to 
tempt him, after the stiff brandy has begun its 
devil's work, to show the waly customer the 
horse or mare in question for a final convinc- 
ing proof of his merits and powers ; for other 
mysterious members of the dark brotherhood to 
close in, and to walk off with the animal, while 
the half-drunken owner is still in the happy 
throes of arorumentation — this is a trick so old 
one wonders there are men still born to whom 
its practice is a novelty. 

" Ah-h ! — - 'cre-nom-de-D — I Hi — there ! 
Thieves ! Murder ! Help ! Catch him — I say ! 
a gold piece to any one who '11 catch him, I 
say. Tonnerre-r-r-e de Dieu — if I catch him 1 ! " 



SOME NIGHT SCENES 103 

Such was the hoarse cry that startled the 
sippers of coffee and brandy about the little 
tables the last night of our stay. The night 
had fallen. Only the stars and a few trembling 
gas jets below them were lighting the town. 

"Ah — that's old Duchesne! I wonder 
what 's up now ! " cried a stout peasant above 
his tall glass. 

Through the dusk of the night a certain 
horse had been led, at a brisk trot, through the 
crowded street, by a small, quick-footed, well- 
dressed man, to whom other people's toes and 
legs were only as so many objects to be hit or 
hurt — when in his or his horse's way. 

The yelling peasant, with scant locks stream- 
ing in the light night wind, and the red gone 
to purple in his terror-stricken face, dancing 
through the crowd in his frenzied flight, was 
scattering gossips and groups right and left. 

Some of the younger men and lads were 
soon after the stolen horse and the gentlemanly 
thief with a rush. But fainter and fainter grew 
the clickety clack that came as the ringing 
answer down the long street, that one who 
knew how to put a good horse to his paces 



I04 FALAISE 

had vanished into the night along with his 
spoils. 

The groups of peasants that had streamed 
out of cafes and house doors now returned to 
their cups and their gossip. The disconsolate 
loser was considerately advised to drown his 
sorrows, at least for the night, in the bowl, that, 
like remorse, reserves its worst dregs for an 
uncertain to-morrow. 

After the din and shrill of the talk had sub- 
sided, the high street settled down to an un- 
wonted calm. 

In the open, brightly lit shops, groups of 
rosy-hued farmers were still holding their 
smoking bees; still sitting in state, wearing 
their high silk caps ; yet was the traffic of talk 
among them as sensibly diminishing as were 
the numbers of drinkers and smokers. 

It was only the fourth night of the Fair. 
Already the town seemed empty. The crowd 
of peasants, that, only the night before had 
packed streets and shops, filling the dark with 
their deep Norman voices, was gone. All the 
long day the Rue Argentan had seen the old 
familiar sight — the long procession of farmers, 



SOME NIGHT SCENES 105 

of grooms, of jockeys and stud-raisers leading 
or riding homewards their bought or unsold 
bargains. 

The packing of horses into the freight cars 
had been one of the shows of this, our last day 
at Falaise, and now, once more, in the warmth 
of the soft August night, we were to make the 
tour of the town. 

The sidewalks were almost emptied of chairs 
and tables. The cobble-stones echoed once 
more to the rustic music of clinking sabots. 
Through half open shutters one could watch 
the tired town folks, candle in hand, mounting 
upwards to their chambers. Lights were out 
early. The long provincial calm was settling 
down upon the old town, cradling it into its 
wonted quiet. 

Some late revellers, who had gathered to 
form a rustic Bacchanalia wound and re- 
wound, with growing uncertainty of tread, up 
and down the hilly streets. Their songs, be- 
gun lustily, were ending in the disorderliness 
of feeble discord. 

Better than click of sabots or Norman sone 
were the scents, that, from unseen gardens, 



I06 FA LAIS E 

cooled and enriched the night winds. Better 
than tottering shapes of boozy peasants were 
the dim forms of trees, that towered up from 
the valley. Better than all was the solemn 
state of the silent churches guarding the city 
squares, rising into the night in the glory of 
their sculptured grace. 

Out of the dark a shadow was born. Small 
at first, scarcely discernible, little by little it 
grew to fair and wondrous shape. Dwarfing 
the town, the dim outlines of the distant forest 
and the noble St. Gervais tower alone seemed 
to match it for grandeur. For the shadow 
was that of the Past — of that great Past when 
Falaise sat on its cliffs like a queen on her 
throne and men paid homage to her. This 
phantom — a luminous shape — followed us, 
beckoning, advancing, retreating — as illusive 
as a dream — yet entering with us into the 
midnight stillness of our inn. 



PART II 
THE TALE OF A TOWN 




William the Conquei^or. 



C^ 



^^^iiW^^I 



CHAPTER I 

THE STORY OF ARLETTE 

" A Faleize out li Dus hant^, 
Une meschine i out amee 
Arlot out nom, de burgeis n^e." 

DOWN the narrow twisting streets that 
climbed the Valdante hillside, there 
passed daily, and twice and thrice daily, hun- 
dreds of years ago, a maiden with a water 
bucket. When the bucket was empty and 
light in the hand, the girl swung her grace 
down the cliff with quick free step. As like as 
not she would mark the rhythm of her swing 
with the snatch of a song. 

As she went, swinging her way downwards, 
heads would pop out of low doors and narrow 
window slits. 

" To the fountain — Arlette ? " 
" Si, — to the fountain — ar 't coming ? " 
The song that had died in Arlette's throat 
w^as then born anew, swollen to a chorus of 



1 1 2 FALAISE 

girlish chatter and laughter. Belted by the 
living clasp of her maiden following, Arlette 
sped onward, all the hamlet's gossip as fresh 
on her lip as the bright noon. 

For all it was late autumn — what a noon it 
was ! If the air was a trifle quick, it but made 
one's breath come the swifter. Just as in mid- 
summer, there was a touch of gold everywhere. 
As one came closer to the river, the air was 
softer, warmer — how the breeze wound itself 
about one's throat and neck, twisting around 
one's naked ankles like a thin wet scarf ! 

Ah — how good it was to be young, to be 
alive, and to be going to the fountain ! 

In all the Valdante there was no place like 
the fountain for the making of a girl's happi- 
ness. This was the excuse of all others for 
taking a turn in the streets. One could be 
sure of a chat with Marthe and Lisette. There 
might come, also, the chance of a " bonjour " to 
a soldier or farmer, as they passed by the river; 
and of all maidens Arlette could be counted 
upon to buy, with that wondrous smile of hers, 
the latest news of Guibray or Falaise. 

In Arlette's own hamlet of La Roche, whose 



THE STORY OF ARLETTE 1 13 

tightly built streets climbed the hillside, there 
was no lack of life. Its very soil wore its tan- 
ner's colors. Half the village was dyed purple 
or red — earth, house-fronts, and men's hands 
and arms whose leathern aprons were the colors 
of the hides spread out a-drying. Water mills 
crunched and groaned. Wind mills pawed an 
air that echoed to a thousand sounds — to the 
bleating sheep; to the rhythmic clang of the 
metal workers in the numerous cutlery shops ; 
to the sound of soused linens and cottons as 
the dyers plunged the stuffs into their deep 
vats — and to the squeal of pigs and the moans 
of the steers being led to their slaughter. 

Ah, no ! there was no lack of stir or life at 
La Roche — this busiest of all the quarters in 
the Valdante. 

As busy as any was Verpray — Arlette's 
father, — the tanner of hides. Verpray, just 
then, was under a cloud. He had been found 
guilty of a fearful offence. He had been caught 
poaching. In the great forests yonder where 
the Count, their Lord, kept his wild beasts, and 
took his chief pleasure in their killing, Verpray 
in common with a goodly number of his fellow 



114 FALAISE 

tradesmen, had gone hunting. Now the great 
Count of Falaise in his own forests was one 
thing; and a miserable lot of tanners, daring 
to risk their lives in the desire to increase their 
stock-in-trade — at the Count's expense — was 
quite another. Ducal forests were not for such 
as they. These Valdanteans must be taught 
their lesson. The gallows yonder on the hill 
were waiting to teach it them. 

By the luckiest of chances the most guilty 
of all the rascals, one Verpray, had been 
caught red-handed. The Count had gleefully 
sworn this one, at least, should hang for his 
crime. 

Other Gods, however, were at work in the 
breezy Valdante than those of pure vengeance. 

For Arlette was going to the fountain ! 

Going also, to so many and such w^onderful 
things besides, that had the vision of her future 
lain there — for her to read in the clear mirror 
of her water-pail — a stronger head than that of 
Arlette's miQ^ht have been turned at the sight. 

What her young eyes did count on seeing, 
there at the fountain, was already before her. 
The familiar figures of the tanners, the soldiers 



THE STORY OF ARLETTE 115 

— with an eye across their shoulders for the 
girl — troop, the farmers' carts rattling by, and 
yes, surely to-day, at least, were they all in luck, 
for up yonder in the woods the horns were 
blowing. The hunt was to pass — this the 
Valdantean way — up to the chateau aloft. 

That Arlette's heart should leap to her throat 
as the Count and his hunting escort came 
sweeping down the steep incline, was little 
wonder. She should see close — almost face 
to face — their dreaded yet half-loved Lord, who 
was to do such fearful things to her father. 
Was he come even now to take his vengeance ? 
Would he stop — and bid her bring her father.? 
Should she see him — Verpray — bound and 
torn — perhaps in rude soldier's grasp going 
up to the dungeons of the fortress 'I 

All the gold in the day was suddenly turned 
to darkness. Then out of the mist before her 
eyes there rode the Lord Robert, sitting his 
horse like a king, with his bird on his wrist. 

It was then Arlette looked at the Count. 
At sight of him a quick sudden strength was 
upon her. He should see none of the fear that 
was gnawing her heart. Perhaps, (who knows T) 



Il6 FALAISE 

if the great Count cast his glance upon her, he 
might read the prayer in her look for her 
father. 

What he read there — what his man's eyes 
saw, kindled a flame so swift, so sharp, that 
Robert, Count d'Hiemes, prospective Duke of 
Normandy, knew his hour had come. 

A girlish, graceful shape tapering to slim 
firm ankles, whose only covering was the snow 
of a skin that turned to peach bloom on the 
rounded cheek ; an open throat, white and full ; 
eyes lucent with goodness that met his own 
bravely, valiantly. For a garment one that 
clothed the maiden better than any court 
mantle, for she wore a dignity that matched his 
own. 

Nom di Dieu ! here was a girl in a thousand. 
Here also was a quick sweet pain, something 
new, strange, imperious. It was a delirium 
worker. The Count d'Hiemes found himself 
riding his horse as lim.p as any love-sick maiden. 

This stage lasted long enough to teach the 
Lord of Falaise and of the Valdante what he 
wanted — what he must have ! The girl was 
there ! God be thanked she was there in his 



THE STORY OF ARLETTE 117 

own hamlet ! Easy enough to pluck that 
peach, since it grew within his own walls. She 
was Verpray's — the poacher's daughter ? He 
had heard aright? Ah! well. Verpray's sin, 
after all, was not so black ; there were others 
who had sinned too, and worse. Verpray's 
crime must be looked into, — could be con- 
doned, doubtless, must be forgotten. A man 
with such a daughter was never born to hang 
from timber. 

" II la requist affectueusement a son pere." 
Thus does the chronicle phrase the Count's 
first overture. It rings with an accent of truth. 
There is in it the spirit of that fine nature 
of the man whose eye-born passion was, even 
at birth, softened to a certain delicacy by 
sentiment. 

Now Verpray, a tanner in his honest hours, 
and Doda his wife, they also had their senti- 
ments to make known. Their Count — a 
coming Duke perchance, love-smitten with 
their daughter .^^ Ah well, they were scarce 
surprised. Others besides the Count had 
marked her fairness ; even the Valdante — 
aye — Falaise too, had eyes. Beauty such as 



Il8 FALAISE 

hers went not abroad unnoticed, and returned 
not unasked. They — her parents — - knew 
their daughter's worth. Knowing it, they dared 
tell even their Lord they had other views than 
that this, their pearl, the treasure of the house, 
should be worn as a nobleman's bauble one 
day and trampled in the dust the next. No! 
no! Arlette was meant for more honorable 
uses than even a future Duke's " amoureuse." 
If however, the Count would but propose 
marriaofe — even one clandestine — ah well ! 
that was an altogether different matter. 

Now of all ways for fanning love's flame into 
the fury of a conflagration, none has yet been 
found surer than a masterly wielding of the 
provocative called opposition. Marry Arlette, 
even love-sick, heart-and-lip-desiring Robert 
felt he could not. The prospective heir to the 
great Duchy of Normandy must not wed a 
tanner's daughter. Certain other well worn 
promises, however, might serve. He would 
only too willingly proffer the common stock-in- 
trade of wealthy, high-born wooers. The only 
she-and-never-another-vow might take a certain 
accent of novelty on noble lips. 



THE STORY OF ARLETTE I 19 

Meanwhile, as prayers and protestations 
worked their way, the Count fed his flame by 
ways none could stop. If the bitter-sweet ache 
for the girl must wait on consentment for its 
soothing, eye and sense could revel in loving 
contemplation of what w^as surely soon to be 
his. 

Often as he had looked forth from the high 
built window of his great fortress, and found 
the earth fair that lay beneath it, never had he 
seen lovelier prospect than that of Arlette at the 
well. Far below him as was that deep pocket 
in the walls, and small as the girl shape looked 
— a child she seemed from that height- — yet did 
her shape and the white and pink and gold of 
her make the blood flood her lover's pulses 
with quick fresh warmth. Ay di Dieu ! What 
a waist for an arm's clasping! What ankles 
to be covered with kisses first and then later 
with courtly tunics, — the cyclades of great 
ladies — that none thereafter might see their 
whiteness. 

And Arlette ? Surely there could be no harm 
in looking up at the Castle. It had ever been 
her habit to scan the great walls. In days not 



1 20 FALAISE 

yet old, other eyes than those of the Master 
had looked through arched windows and 
from turreted walls to throw their fiery glances 
downwards. And now? Ah well — the lordly 
shape that leant its strength across the window 
ledge, to watch her coming, how could she — 
a girl, Arlette, the tanner s daughter — how 
could she help the lifting of her eyes to answer 
back the bolt of love shot down to her? 

In these days Arlette went oftener than 
common to the fountain. 

Meanwhile Verpray " toutefois fut du due 
tant prie et requis par la grande affecion qu'il 
vit que le due avoit a la pucelle sa fille " so 
greatly did the Duke (not yet Duke, but Count 
d'Hiemes) importune Verpray, and so im- 
pressed was the latter by the great love and 
affection of the "Duke" for the maiden his 
daughter, that Verpray was brought to the 
point of consenting — provided always "Arlette 
y mit son consentiment." 

When Arlette herself was put to the torture 
question, what answer did she give ? For 
torture question it was. There was all the 
dowry of her virtue, hope of honest marriage, 



THE STORY OF ARLETTE 121 

children who might not blush to call her 
mother — here was the price to be paid for — 
for what ? Could she be sure, really sure of 
the great Lord meaning her well? Ah mi! 
What a dazzling, soul-disturbing lover he 
made — that shape against the window ! Had 
he not come down from his splendid castle, 
again and again, as humble as any poor tanner 
of the hamlet, to sue and plead and beg? His 
lips breathed promises as rich as his love 
seemed hot and urgent. 

Beyond even the love and the lover swam, 
golden-misted, the vision of a grandeur daz- 
zling indeed to a bare-foot girl. How indeed 
was she to answer ? 

Listen to the answer, and read in it the 
nature of that soul that was to mother one 
of the world's conquerors. 

" Mon pere, je suis votre fille et geniture, 
ordonnez de moi ce ku'il vous plaist. Je suis 
prete a vous obeir." 

"De cette response fut le due moult joyeux." 

How you read it, I know not. To me it 
seems the very pearl of an answer. Her heart 
was the Count's — her true lover's — already. 



122 FALAISE 

Consentment breathes through every line. 
But, even to and before one's parents, to one's 
own self as well, above all, to fierce-tongued, 
gossip-gifted Valdante, one's willingness to the 
making of such a bargain must wear the out- 
ward semblance of decency. She yielded read- 
ily, but at the parental command. 

The Count understood ; he was " moult 
joyeux." 

All had not yet been said, however, by the 
obedient tanner's daughter. She had come 
to firmer ground in these weeks of parley- 
ing. She had found a prop, one sure, strong, 
more potent than all others, to stay her girl- 
strength ; she knew now all she might dare. 

In those dim days, as in our brighter so- 
called wise ones, women took their troubles to a 
priest. Arlette's family boasted something wiser 
even than the parish priest. A hermit-uncle 
nursed his soul and starved his mortal parts in 
the neighboring Falaisian woods. To him 
Arlette took her torn mind that he might 
mend it. The hermit — did he have his help 
from heaven, or, did he, forgetting his vows, 
remember he too had once been a man 1 



THE STORY OF ARLETTE 123 

From whatever the source, his spiritual lips 
breathed a strange earthly wisdom. "Let the 
girl go up to her noble lover." Whether what 
happened next was of his ordering, no chroni- 
cler will say. But once the hermit-uncle had 
been seen a new and quite womanly power 
grows upon Arlette. 

Yes, she would be the Count's " Amie;" she 
would go up to him, even as he wished, though 
she w^ent with all her heart in her mouth. She 
would stay with him, in his high-perched castle, 
there to be his love. But for this her undoing, 
she must go, attended by the state that should 
be hers, were she indeed to be the noble Count's 
true wife. Otherwise she would not go. 

The man in the lover's soul consented. But 
the Lord of Falaise was a Norman. Yes; the girl 
should have her escort ; on the night following, 
he would send a guard and she was to be brought 
to him at the castle secret door — the "poterne." 

"The secret door?" cried the voice from 
La Roche ! " Never, in God's world ! " She, 
Arlette, had named, as the sole price of her 
love a wife's escort. A wife's escort she would 
have, or none at all. 



124 FALAISE 

Here indeed was a new and strange stop. 
But Robert was a man of wit ; he had an eye 
for the humor of a situation. Also, presuma- 
bly, such pride and firmness of mind in a 
tanner's daughter, must have plunged Robert, 
the lover, twenty fathoms the deeper in his sea 
of longing for her. 

She should have her courtly escort. He 
would send the girl his own guard; his 
"chevaliers" should bring her up from the 
low cottaee door at La Roche to the cha- 
teau where his heart was preparing a wel- 
come more splendid than the state she would 
find awaiting her. 

His heart's beating, however, still must wait 
on a maiden's obstinacy. 

For Robert's knights had been sent on foot, 
dismounted. The guard was no guard at all. 

Back to the giant fortress marched the 
troop of noblemen. Warriors ripe in years, 
youthful knights, heroes of the tournament, 
and mighty hunters of the forest, all were sent 
trapesing back. " Bring your steeds " was the 
tanner's daughter's word of command. 

Can you fancy the laughter, deep-chested or 



THE STORY OF ARLETTE 125 

treble-pitched? The oaths that must perforce 
have ended in gay jesting ? What jokes must 
have leapt to lip, what wit have flashed, as 
knights and warriors re-wound their way 
across the steeps, meekly to seek their chargers 
for the getting of Verpray's daughter. 

And the Valdante ! And Falaise ! And 
Guibray ! What of the neighbors, the tanners, 
the cutlers, the dyers ? What of the women's 
heads thick as strung berries, hanging from all 
the windows, and every gossip at her post on 
the door-step ? W^as ever such a sight seen as 
this, the great knights running to and fro at 
Arlette's — Arlette's of all maidens — bidding? 
Such goings on were beyond even a witch's 
prophecy ! 

Now let the tanner's yards and cutler's doors 
and all the windows thicken with faces, for 'tis 
the last these neisfhbors of hers will ever see 
of Arlette — as Arlette ! 

There she was, at last ! Nom di Dieu, — 
but how grand she was grown, already ! She 
rode her horse like a queen. As a queen's 
was her pomp and state. Her troop was about 
her now, brave in color, their short mantles 



126 FALAISE 

showing their crimson and blues. Nobly 
mounted, the Count's chevaliers were in- 
deed guarding Arlette — Arlette, the tanners 
daughter. 

At high noon, in the pale harmonizing 
autumnal sun, she and her soldiers made the 
full circuit of Falaise. Through its streets 
packed close with low houses; through the 
mud, the mire, and rain-soaked straw, and 
through the aisles of the muttering, murmur- 
ing crowds of her fellow townspeople, Arlette 
rode grandly to her undoing. 

At the chateau, "the great doors of the 
town's gateway must be opened for her, and 
the draw-bridge lowered." 

Thus it was that Arlette gave herself to her 
lover. 



CHAPTER II 

ROBERT THE MAGNIFICENT 

" Tot fut la porte defermee 
Et tot eissi I'ont ens menee 
Deciqu'en la chambre (voutice) 
Ou ont maint ymaige peintice 
A or, vermeil et a colors." 

THE narrow room, built into the fortress 
walls, where Robert's chevaliers led 
Arlette, no longer glows with the " many 
painted images in gold and enamel," that must 
have dazzled the girl's eyes as greatly as did 
the face of her lover. 

The walls of the famous little chamber are 
now of rough plaster. Beneath the low vaulted 
ceiling there are still left the narrow alcove, 
large enough for the primitive eleventh-century 
bed, and the wide chimney mouth where a 
whole forest, doubtless, of noble timber has 
furnished light and warmth for generations of 
men. 



128 FALAISE 

The splendor of appointments in that small 
closet in a fortress wall was of the semi-bar- 
baric order of luxury of a rude age. Already, 
before he was come to his ducal seat, both his 
soldiers and his subject people had named 
Robert. His liberality and his love of lavish 
expenditure had won for him the title of 
" Magnificent." To his Northman's spirit of 
adventure and his impetuous ardor he united 
the Roman's delight in sumptuous surround- 
ings. This chamber that glowed with color; 
the strange-faced archaic images lit into splen- 
dor by flaming torches ; the arras hanging at 
alcove and door, thick with shadowy figure 
shapes ; the skins that lay upon the couches 
and the gleams of the pale Merovingian gold 
encircling the rough-cut jewels on mantle 
clasp and necklace — thus, both in his person 
and in his fortress home, Robert presented a 
semi-Oriental love of the splendid. 

Robert's career, as lover, warrior, knight and 
huntsman, and later as Duke and Pilgrim, are 
the more easily conceivable to the nineteenth- 
century mind, when viewed from this gentle- 
man's bed-chamber. 



ROBERT THE MAGNIFICENT 



129 



For gentleman, Robert Count d'Hiemes and 
later sixth Duke of Normandy, unquestionably 
was. His life proved his right to the title. 
This is no light praise for a Duke and a Nor- 
man of his time. The trace of " Pirate " in his 
Northman's blood was almost lost. There was 
enough left of the old Scandinavian love of 
adventure to make Robert as picturesque a 
figure as he was gallant and brave. In this 
Portrait of a Gentleman there are no effete 
Chesterfieldian traits to mar the noble Rem- 
brandtish breadth and glow. One feels one's 
self to be in the presence of a man. 

He strides across the pages of history with 
the sure live tread of a strong personality. At 
the outset Robert presents himself with the 
carriage and outlines of the man of action, 
rather than of one who drifts to his place. 

As the non-reigning member of his House, 

an obscure Count d'Hiemes, Robert found 

the territory assigned to him too small for the 

stage of his activities. In Falaise, close by his 

domain, a hill-town with a cliff fortress, he 

saw a town and donjon exactly to his liking. 

Falaise at the time was not considered as rank- 

9 



130 FALAISE 

ing especially high among the towns in Nor- 
man land. Coutances, Avranches, Bayeux, 
Lisieux, and of course, Rouen the capital, 
these and others were esteemed as far more 
valuable " strong places." 

Robert's keen eye had seen, however, one 
great military advantage in the seizure of 
Falaise. That fortress on its cliffs was the 
key to the open plains that led to the sea. 
Whoever held the key could hold fast the treas- 
ure-house of lower Normandy. As huntsman, 
this Nimrod among Normans, also, had looked 
upon the vast forests engirdling Falaise, and 
found them to be the very forests of his desires. 
For beasts and birds, for every creature that 
was wildest, freest, fleetest, these forests were 
famed. 

Now it chanced that both the coveted hill- 
sides and the populous forests belonged to 
Robert's brother William, who, as rei2:nine 
Duke of Normandy, was also Robert's over 
Lord. Robert, however, was not a Norman 
for nothing. These Northmen had kept true 
to the adventurer's disdainful habit of laughing 
at fetters. 



ROBERT THE MAGNIFICENT 131 

The question of the ownership of Falaise 
was one to be proved — not by right — but by 
might. This latter was that higher law of 
acquisition which was as potent in feudal 
Normandy as it is in our own days. 

Robert being a soldier, and no subtle 
capitalist or financier, having decided to 
own Falaise, proceeded to make the place 
exceedingly tight. 

Vague as is the history of the beginnings of 
the cliff fortress, its earlier historians point to 
Charlemagne as its first restorer. Later when 
the " Pirate Dukes " had made the valuable 
discovery that the land that owned the most 
fortresses and walled towns could dictate terms 
to all the rest of France, the third of the Nor- 
man Dukes, Richard-the-Fearless, greatly im- 
proved and enlarged the Donjon of Falaise, its 
walls and enclosed places. 

Sixty years later, when Robert's clever and 
covetous gaze fell upon Falaise, the place 
might have tempted even a less reckless and 
audacious spirit. The fortress walls stretched 
their heights above the moats that lay below in 
the deep valleys of the plain on one side, and 



132 FALAISE 

the Valdante cleft on the other. Watch-towers 
showed their square teeth above the clear 
cliff heights. There were stately gateways, 
with ponderous drawbridge and portcullis. 
The space within the fortress walls was large 
enough for military manoeuvres, for the chang- 
ing of the guard, or for use as a training place 
for the Norman youth in the difficult ait of 
chivalry. 

Then as now, town and fortress sat upon 
their green cliff wath a fairy unlikeness to 
their life and purpose. More like unto the 
vision of walls and a city seen in a dream, 
must feudal Falaise have shone to Robert's 
eyes even as now it shines in its glitter of high 
perched roof tiles and noble wall fronts to our 
sober gaze. That ^' Spirit of Places " which 
the poet-essayist would have us find in all the 
lovelier, nobler sites where men have lived, 
toiled, fought, and loved, lives on here at 
Falaise. A bright-winged shape, its " spirit " 
of romance, of adventure, of large prosperity 
and high destiny floats upwards from the green 
vales to the glittering cliff summits. The 
charm of Falaise is as compelling for us as 



ROBERT THE MAGNIFICENT i-w 

it was for longing Robert. Its charm once 
seen and felt was, and is, irresistible. It had 
and has a feminine perdurability of fascination, 
capturing e3'e and sense with its gracious hill 
shapes, its tender slopes, its verdant valley 
breadth, and ceaseless play of change and 
contrast. 

Robert proved his love for the beautiful cliff 
town in true gallant fashion. He was willing 
to fight for its possession. He was even will- 
ing to sacrifice a mere brother. The brother, 
it is true, was at a pleasing geographical dis- 
tance when Robert's subjugation by Falaise 
was first strong upon him. William, the 
Duke, was most conveniently away from that 
part of lower Normandy, on some business of 
governing. The first investiture of Falaise 
was therefore made the easier for the Count 
d'Hiemes. 

The marching of an army a few hundred 
leagues southward was, however, as easy a 
feat in those fighting days for William, as 
Robert had found it to settle himself in a 
castle which did not happen to belong to him. 

It was no brother, it was William, reigning 



134 FALAISE 

Duke of Normandy who knocked at the for- 
tress door for admission into his own castle. 
The knock was no gentle one. At first Robert 
was disposed to keep him at the idle business 
of knocking. The masterful way in which the 
war machinery of that day was handled by 
William's soldiers, however, soon gave Robert 
some hours of uneasiness. Strong as were his 
walls, Robert already saw them all but entered, 
— before a sudden thought struck him. 

After all, why fight one's own brother, when 
the brother happens to have so peculiarly skil- 
ful an army 1 How much better to be mag- 
nanimous — and hold out the hand of forgive- 
ness .^^ One is not surnamed the " Magnificent " 
for nothing. 

William, on his part, showed as noble a 
spirit. A reconciliation took place. The 
brothers separated all the closer friends be- 
cause of the recent unpleasantness. The 
blood that is thicker than water went to 
the signing of the pact. 

For the short month after, Robert's and the 
town's history was that of happy lovers and 
nations. In the neio'hborino- forests of Gouf- 



ROBERT THE MAGNIFICENT 135 

fern and of Eraines, Robert was content to 
spend his days. Fatherhood followed swift on 
the joys of his happy love-life with Arlette. 
But before he was father, William, his brother, 
the Duke died, to the usual accompanying 
suspicion of poison, this latter being the medi- 
aeval explanation of all sudden deaths. 

With Robert's seven years of active reisfn as 
Duke, we have no present concern. The pages 
of history are full of his chivalrous actions, 
such as helping his King keep his own throne; 
of his somewhat less definite plan for a capture 
of England than that of his greater son, under 
pretence of restoring his nephews to their 
English throne, — one which the wind and 
waves decided was to end in failure, his fleet 
being wrecked ; also of his aid to the Count of 
Flanders, and of his wars against Brittany. 

Altogether Robert's seven years of reign 
were busy ones. 

His son was thus set an example in the paths 
of adventure, and of the daring which is two 
thirds of the art of conquering. "To have is 
to hold ; " that was the lesson of the capture 
of Falaise. Robert's other wars were admoni- 



1 36 FALAISE 

tory of the fact that he who only minds his 
own business will lose an opportunity, per- 
chance, of getting a valuable slice of his 
neighbor's. 

Robert, meanwhile, did not forget Falaise. 
In Falaise there was at least the one, possibly 
there were the two, whom he loved best in the 
world. His " little bastard " was being brought 
up in that healthful hill town. Whether or 
not Arlette remained with her child, his- 
torians, on this unimportant point, are provok- 
ingly silent. They all agree, however, as to 
one fact. Arlette kept Robert her true lover. 
She bound him fast through all the years of 
his life. 

Constancy, when love is domesticated to the 
daily need, is best preserved not by absence, 
but by the living presence. Arlette, therefore, 
must have been as often within Rouen's walls 
as in her own Falaisian ones. 

One of the chief services Robert's restless 
energies bequeathed to Falaise was his starting 
the Fair that was subsequently known as the 
Fair of Guibray. 

Robert was as quick as an American to act on 



ROBERT THE MAGNIFICENT I 37 

a new idea. Seeing that a certain miraculous 
discovery of a statue of the Virgin was attract- 
ing large crowds first of the devout, then of 
image vendors, and finally of merchants of all 
sorts, it occurred to the Duke to turn this 
accidental gathering into the lucrative form of 
a yearly Fair. The first Fair was held beneath 
the walls of Robert's own stronghold. There, 
where the roads of Caen and Tours and Brit- 
tany met, came the merchants, horse traders, 
and petty vendors. 

Robert's inestimable services to Falaise did 
not stop with this inauguration of her long 
period of wealth and prosperity. He was also 
the founder of several public fountains in the 
city of his love. 

In our own luxurious time, to "found" a 
fountain would be as archaic an act as to re- 
build a feudal fortress. Consider the origi- 
nality proved by a prince in a semi-barbaric 
period of such a public-spirited action ! Robert 
also, doubtless, cherished a certain excusable 
weakness for fountains. Had he not found 
Arlette at one } 

The chroniclers, having stumbled upon this 



138 FALAISE 

rara avis of a prince who could do useful 
things royally, continue to discover other acts 
as remarkable. Robert is said to have estab- 
lished the first hospital in Falaise. Certain 
historians are also to be found still quarrelling 
over this latter achievement. I, for one, can- 
not see why the starting of a hospital, on an 
early primitive scale should have been any 
more impossible or unlikely than a giving- of 
the sumptuous and elaborate banquets, so 
much in vogue at Rouen during that culminat- 
ing period of Normandy's importance. 

With all this generous gift of his time, his 
energies, his armies and his treasure, there 
was a darker side to Robert's character. As 
in his gifts and feasts he was "magnificent," 
his people, when he was but a Count, had 
found him possessing traits not cjuite as lordly. 
He was known to them, early in his youth as 
" Robert-the-Devil." Yet Robert, as history 
paints him, shows no trace of any specially 
devilish attributes save in a quickness of temper 
and certain dark promises of evil in youth, 
which his later manhood failed to confirm. 

In two notable instances, however, Robert 



ROBERT THE MAGNIFICENT 139 

showed that the " devil " of an obdurate obsti- 
nacy was inrooted in him. 

Deeply as he loved Arlette, he never mar- 
ried her. A father, if ever there was one, 
thrilling to every obligation a passionate pater- 
nity had developed, yet he left his son a 
bastard. 

That Arlette must have longed and pled for 
the place, when loved and honored as mis- 
tress, and mother of a noble son, that her lord 
had denied to her when but an ignorant and 
unknown girl, who can doubt 1 Besides all 
the potent reasons for making her a lawful 
wife, Arlette could point to not one, but two, 
precedents for such an act of restitution in her 
Robert's immediate family. The first and 
greatest of the Norman Dukes, Rollo himself, 
when his princesse Gisella, the King's daughter, 
died, had he not taken to wife " la belle 
Popee " } Years before, he had carried her off 
before the eyes of her father, the Count of 
Bayeux. Having had her as his " Amou- 
reuse ; " holding her dear as the mother of his 
children yet he had heartlessly repudiated her 
when he married Gisella. But had he not 



140 FALAISE 

when widowed, retaken Popee by the hand 
and married her, before the great church doors ? 
If Robert, remembering his princely blood, had 
then urged in reply that Popee at least was a 
Comte's daughter, Arlette must have had an 
answer ready to her need. For Richard 
the Fearless — fearless indeed he was — had 
married Gonor, sister-in-law of a humble 
forest-guard — also " en face de I'eglise " — thus 
legitimatizing Robert's own grandsire ! 

Now when any such little family discussions 
came up, Arlette must have made it particularly 
unpleasant for Robert, I take it. That her 
arguments were of no avail, proves anew that 
while for many a devil there are ways and 
tricks of exorcisement not wholly vain, for the 
plague of obstinacy there is no cure save death. 

The cure came about, in Robert's case, 
from his second recorded act of stubborn 
determination. 

Whether it was that his quick blood wearied 
within him, because there were no more Kings, 
or Counts, or nephews to right, or vassals to 
fight and conquer, or whether the charms of 
Arlette were waning (there are all sorts of 



ROBERT THE MAGNIFICENT 141 

reasons for a man's thinking about his soul), 
Robert announced his intention of startino- for 
the Holy Land. In Robert's case to intend 
was to do. 

At the most critical of all periods for his 
state, as well as for the future of his acknowl- 
edged heir, in the teeth of all the protesting 
eloquence of his counsellors, did Robert in the 
seventh year of his reign proceed to set out 
on the fashionable penitential journey of his 
day. 

Neither Arlette's prayers, nor the protests 
of his subjects, nor even a son's future hung in 
the balance of that " kind of satisfaction which 
those who wished to do penance " then imposed 
upon themselves — as Langevin, the priest- 
historian, phrases Robert's mistaken enterprise. 

Being a man with a high sense of duty, 
Robert proceeded to put his affairs in order. 
Before laying aside the mace and taking up 
the cross, he assembled his vassals, presenting 
to them the boy William as their future Sover- 
eign ; for the journey to Jerusalem in those days 
was one to be undertaken with the almost sure 
certainty of death meeting one along the route. 



142 FA LAIS E 

Later, Robert also took the young " bastard " 
to Paris, where Henri I the King, received 
the youth, and promised to superintend his 
education. Having selected Alain, Duke of 
Brittany, to govern Normandy in his absence, 
Robert the Penitent took leave of his Duchy 
and Arlette and set out upon his long journey. 

As all his life long this vehement nature had 
never done anything by halves, " Robert the 
Magnificent" even as pilgrim, v^as magnificent 
still. The tales of his adventures along the 
later well-worn Crusader's roads read, in the 
chronicles of the time, like the acts of a fairy 
prince in disguise. Gifts and benefits he flung 
about with the heedless hand of the generous. 
As pilgrim, however, as extravagantly did he 
court humiliation. Seeing but a bare-footed 
pauper in the humble garb of a passing pilgrim, 
a certain gate-keeper sent the Duke reeling 
from the force of a blow^ given to quicken his 
pace. The troop of Norman gentlemen about 
him were for summarily punishing the insolent 
guard. 

" Don't touch him," cried the Duke. " It is 
but reasonable and just that men should suffer 



ROBERT THE MAGNIFICENT 1 43 

for the love of God. I love the blow he gave 
me better than my city of Rouen." 

When he fell ill in the country of the Sara- 
cens, " au pays de Sarrasins," and was forced 
to take to his litter, his wit was as nimble as 
when he had seen a humorous vengeance in 
forcing a recalcitrant vassal to do him homage 
with a saddle on his back. Four and four, his 
sixteen Saracens carried him by turn. A cer- 
tain Norman, returning from the Holy Land, 
as he made his salutations, asked of the Duke 
what message he could carry back to his people. 

" Thou canst tell my people and my friends," 
said the Duke — one seems to hear the strong 
Norman laughter through the words, — " that 
thou mettest me thus, and here, where four 
devils were carrying me to Paradise." 

Before he went to Paradise, he knelt at the 
sacred sepulchre. The splendor of his offer- 
ings was a nine days' wonder. On the return 
journey, however, after drinking some foul 
water at Nice^, he died. 

On the brow of a boy of seven the ducal 
crown of Normandv then rested. 



CHAPTER III 

THE YOUNG DUKE WILLIAM AT FALAISE 

1HAVE a little Bastard," Robert had cried 
grandly to his Barons, whom he had sum- 
moned about him at Rouen, for the express 
purpose of making the above announcement, 
" who will grow up, if God so wills it, of whose 
prudence and valor I hope much. I have no 
doubt whatsoever that he is of my begetting, 
therefore I pray you receive him as your Lord, 
and from henceforth I present him to you of 
the Duchy as my heir." 

To swear allegiance to a child of seven 
and a bastard, might well have seemed an 
act of folly even to men whose sense of 
humor was but rudimentally developed, or 
Feudalism would never have had a chance of 
moulding modern society. As it fell out, 
bastard though William was, there was no one 
among his relations who was any better off in 
the matter of legitimacy. His immediate 



VOC/A'G DUKE WILLIAM AT FALAISE 145 

cousins were either churchmen, or women, or of 
birth as tainted as his own. The Barons, there- 
fore, acclaimed the child Duke. William, look- 
ing twice his age, and with a something in his 
look and carriage which bore out his father's 
boast of the quality in him, then began the 
long fifty-two years of his troubled but triumph- 
ant reign. 

The twelve years following his father's death 
and his own accession were spent in going to 
school. As one of his more famous historians 
tersely remarks, his schooling was a stern one. 
At an age when a modern boy's most serious 
occupation is an innocuous thievery of birds' 
nests, or a playing at the knavery of desperado, 
William was in training for his Knighthood. 
At twelve he had already lived the life of a 
page and courtier at Paris and Rouen ; at 
barely thirteen he proved himself soldier with 
the makings in him of a general, leading 
a brilliant assault upon his own Castle of 
Falaise. 

There are certain towns, like some women, 
who carry with them the magic of a good in- 
fluence. Falaise was such an influence in the 

10 



•146 FA LAIS E 

great Duke's early life. His real childhood 
was passed there. On the grassy fortress 
ramparts, he was trained to his first knowledge 
and skill in the use of arms in whose wielding 
he was to show, later, such prowess. Falaise 
also, gave William his first chance of proving 
to his Barons and his Duchy that that w^iich 
had been given to him he meant to keep. It 
was at Falaise that, with his first victory, even 
as boy, he showed that while he could be 
merciful in the hour of victory, he could use 
victory and meant so to do, to wipe the hated 
stain from off his name. He righted his 
mother there. 

If down in the Valdante Robert had found 
the rapture of that illicit love that was to 
darken his greater son's career, William, in his 
turn, found in his great fortress uplifted, Vvcll- 
nigh impregnable, an arm of power which, 
even as a child, he knew how to use. 

There could never have been a time when 
the possession of so noble a structure as was 
the Chateau of Falaise could have failed to 
have had its effect on so impressionable a 
nature as William's. If the fingrer of scorn 



VOC/A^G DUKE WILLIAM AT FALAISE 1 47 

could be pointed at his mother, Arlette, as she 
sat in the house near the square, a house long 
known as " Le Manoir de Guillaume," where 
William's own earliest childhood was presum- 
ably spent, how the fiery glow of pride must have 
burned in the bov's soul, when he thouo:ht of 
the great fortress that was his. Fierce re- 
solves of vengeance, hot vows of valorous 
deeds to be done, must the possessorship of such 
a stronghold have bred in the boy's breast. 
How these vows were kept the maimed citizens 
of Alen9on could have told you. 

The Falaise of the eleventh century pre- 
sented a very different aspect to the young 
impressionable eye of the boy-Duke than it 
does to-day to our delighted gaze. 

The Falaise that William lived in was a 
town of scattered groups of houses, built 
mostly of wood ; mean and low dwellings they 
would seem to us, with their more or less filthy 
interiors. These poorer dwellings were in- 
terspersed with the larger, more commodious 
houses — " manoirs " of nobles and the well-to- 
do ; for Falaise, from its earliest days, appears to 
have been the resort of Norman nobility, rather 



148 FA LAIS E 

than of merchants. These houses lined the 
larger streets that were not much wider than a 
man's mantle. The narrow streets were be- 
clouded with dust in summer; and in wet or 
winter weather, they were a bog of mud and 
mire. These streets, mean as they were, 
formed, nevertheless, an important eleventh- 
century town. As such it was one to be forti- 
fied and protected. Great walls stretched 
about the long nave-like height on which 
Falaise was built. The gates of the town 
were not as numerous in William's day as they 
were later, when six noble gates, some of which 
with their towers and turrets were each a for- 
tress in themselves, with their stores and garri- 
sons, made the fortifications of Falaise a terror 
to France for long centuries. 

Of the churches we now study so admiringly 
in Falaise, not one, as now built, was standing 
in William's time. In the market square, on 
the site of St. Gervais, there stood, in his 
time a chapel, known as La Chapelle Ducale. 
When he began to feel the building mania of 
his age possess him the chapel was torn down, 
and the Norman structure of St. Gervais was 



YOUNG DUKE WILLIAM AT FALAISE 149 

begun. In the square close to the gates of the 
fortress, known as " La Place Guillaume," in 
this square the older church of St. Trinite 
stood, where William was baptized. 




Place Guillaume le Conqiiera7it^ Falaise. 



The heart and soul of eleventh-century 
Falaise were not, however, in its wall-begirt 
town, in its market squares, or in its churches. 
Its true life throbbed within its fortress walls. 
As in the gymnasia of the Greeks all that was 
best of social or military life was to be seen 
and met, so a great feudal fortress such as 
that of Falaise, was the centre, not only of 



150 FA LAIS E 

Falaise itself, but of the surrounding country. 
In times of peace, the fortress was the 
rallying point, the natural meeting place for 
all the huntsmen and friendly nobles of its 
immediate neighborhood. In those days of a 
fighting life there were but tw^o occupations 
for the well-born, — war and the chase. When 
neither besieging nor being besieged, the nobles 
took to flying their falcons, or to a slay- 
ing of the boar or other wild beasts. As 
Robert had found, the forests of Gouffern and 
Eraines were matchless in the quantity and 
variety of beasts and birds to be killed. 

The hunts organized from the chateau, there- 
fore, offered unparalleled advantages to the 
surrounding nobility. 

While the almost trackless forests resounded 
to the ring of the horn, on the sunny ramparts 
of the fortress the clash of steel, the tramp of 
horses' hoofs, and shock of mimic contest rose 
up day after day. For if the forests surround- 
ing Falaise were unrivalled from a sportsman's 
point of view, the great fortress terraces or 
plains were equally famous as offering an ideal 
training ground for the Norman youth. This 



VOOWG DUKE WILLIAM AT FALAISE 151 

training in the various arts of chivalry began 
at an early age. The blows that were to tell 
so powerfully in the battle of Val-es-Dunes; — 
that masterly handling of the mace that won 
William his way to the Senlac heights on the 
greatest of all days for a Norman, were first 
given with feebler, but skilful touch, on the 
Falaisian ramparts, by the child William. 
Here also, William formed those lasting 
friendships with the young nobles of the 
neighborhood, friendships which were to tell 
so powerfully at Mantes, at Alen9on, and at 
Hastings. From his earliest days his Falai- 
sians were true to him. They followed him 
at his first boy's siege of his fortress ; they 
were about him at Val-es-Dunes, at Alen9on, at 
Varaville, at Domfront, at Mantes. When 
they followed him across the seas to England, 
William rewarded them as a conqueror should ; 
he divided among them, with lavish hand, 
the English lands they had helped him to 
win. 

Although a Duke's son and heir, William, 
during his childhood was known to his subjects 
of Falaise, as a Lord was rarely known. 



152 FALAISE 

For there was the house near the square 
where his mother sat. This house — " Le 
Manoir de Guillaume," as it was called — stood 
on the Rue Campferme close to the immemori- 
all}^ old square. Besides his mother, after 
his father had gone on his penitent's pilgrim- 
age, the figure of William's plebeian grandfather 
must also have been a familiar one in and 
about the house. Robert, when he turned 
pilgrim, had no further use for a valet; the 
simplicity of the pilgrim's garb precluded 
the possibility of valeting being a necessity. 
Verpray being, therefore, to put it somewhat 
forcibly, both out of place and an occupation, 
must inevitably have drifted back to his old 
haunts. For habit is strong. Even after a 
rise in the world to be a Duke's valet — to 
which place his son-in-law had unwisely raised 
him — even after one has had to do with rich 
mantles, has handled ducal crowns and 
jewelled clasps, one's- fingers still may itch, 
I say, for coarse tough hides, and one may 
pant for the smell of such in a cleft where 
a tiny river runs. 

With a grandfather whose highest position 



YOUNG DUKE WILLIAM AT FALAISE 153 

had been that of valet and whose chosen 
haunts were, presumably, the tanner's quarters ; 
and with a mother who, however dear and 
tender, must still be held as one apart, there 
was indeed no chance for William to forget 
his bastardy, or for his youthful comrades to 
feel that impassable distance otherwise ren- 
dered inevitable by virtue of the lad's high 
rank. 



CHAPTER IV 

William's capture of falaise 

WILLIAM'S first appearance in the char- 
acter of warrior was one to stir the blood. 
Its appeal to the imagination is still a potent 
one. The situation was instinct with those ele- 
ments of romance which make an historic per- 
formance occasionally as thrilling and complete, 
in dramatic incident and mise-en-scene^ as the 
setting of a Shakespearian play or of a Dumas 
novel. 

Not a single detail or trick of circumstance 
so dear to the writer of romantic tragedy was 
wanting. There w^ere even one or two points 
which might not have been ventured upon, by 
even the " King of Romantics," so wildly 
impossible were they. 

There, well up in the foreground, so to speak, 
was the Chateau of Falaise, as ideal a feudal 
fortress as one could conceive. The finest crea- 
tive instinct could not have imagined one better 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE I 55 

placed, with due regard to splendor of situation 
and appointment, one uniting, more pictorially, 
grim strength and a lyrical background. 

Within the stern fortress frame were just the 
right characters — those dearest to the heart of 
the dramatist and to our own ; for in these 
tamer, more conventional days, what morsel so 
delectable to the palate of the imagination as a 
black-hearted traitor? 

Treachery w^as as common in these grand old 
fighting eleventh-century days as it is in our own 
time when we call it by less unpopular names. 

If ever a King was bound by the commonest 
ties of decency, gratitude, and honor to a 
youthful heir, Henry, King of the French, in 
the years of William's minority was to the said 
William. But Henry could conveniently for 
get his debt to Robert ; forget his vow to 
cherish and protect his son ; forget, in a word 
he was both King and Christian in his entirely 
natural human desire to possess Normandy. 
For Henry was French. The Normans were 
still the Northmen. After more than a hun- 
dred years of occupancy all France agreed that 
to win back a valuable seaboard, to retake and 



156 FALAISE 

to remake Rouen a French city, to abase Nor- 
man power and Norman ambition were acts 
worthy a French King's ambition. Where 
were the treaties, promises, or vows that could 
stand against such patriotic projects ? Henry, 
therefore, grasped the first opportunity offered 
to have his hand in the game of dismember- 
ing the formidable Duchy. The opportunity 
that presented itself must have seemed one 
heaven-worked. 

Toustain — or Thurstain, as Englishmen call 
the canny son of a canny Danish father, was 
the instrument chosen by God — if you looked 
at the situation from the Parisian standpoint, 
instead of from Rouen's point of view. Tou- 
stan, as Vicomte of Hiemes, was governor — 
" maitre " of the Falaisian stronghold. 

Henry, backed by the large party of dis- 
affected Norman nobles — who, on principle, 
were for any heir rather than the rightful one, 
and also by the strength of French feeling, had 
begun to lay waste a Duchy which he short- 
sightedly believed might, possibly, one day be 
his. There was an earlier quarrel about a 
certain fortress at Tillieres which need not be 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FA LAIS E 157 

entered into here. In this previous affair 
Henry already had shown how untrustworthy 
a King's oath might be. 

When Kings lead the way in the broad road 
of dishonor, why should lesser men hesitate ? 

Toustain, who should have marched out, to 
give Henry a reminder that he was on Wil- 
liam's territory, when the French King was 
devastating Exmes or Hiesmois, did nothing 
of the sort. Instead, he paid his King the 
flattering tribute of imitation. He, too, turned 
traitor. While Henry was gaily devastating 
Hiesmois, Toustain, on his part, proposed a 
bit of rascality entirely in keeping, it appears, 
with the spirit of the age. He suggested to 
Henry that he (Toustain) should surrender 
Falaise and its fortress in return for the rich 
country of Hiesmois of which he himself was 
Vicomte. Henry leapt at the suggestion. He 
even sent a French garrison to help swell 
Toustain's troops, in fear lest the fortress 
should have to fight the faithful Normans still 
left. 

The fortress, with this possibility before it, 
took its precautionary measures. Its stores of 



158 FALAISE 

provisions were increased, and the French gar- 
rison was hurried in. Soon, from the chateau's 
ramparts and terraces were sent echoing down 
the valleys the sounds men love best. From 
the ramparts came the tramp of armed men; 
from the towers and turrets of the great 
gates came the ring of steel and the chorus 
of soldiers' voices. 

Below, the wide moats reflected the image 
of the fortress above, armed to its teeth, — 
awaiting attack. 

And in the valleys of the Valdante, in faith- 
ful, indignant Falaise, men shivered and shud- 
dered, and wondered what sign from Heaven 
would come to announce a deliverer. 

This part of the scene, I think you will 
concede, was fairly well set. 

But the best is to come. It is not in the first, 
but in the second act of this moving drama, 
we are to get the very heart of action. 

From across the abyss of nearly ten cen- 
turies of time, the ear seems still to catch the 
sounds of a dashing headlong ride. Out from 
Rouen, from a ducal palace, down the Seine, 
across it, swifter and swifter swept the flying 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE 159 

figure of the boy-Duke. By his side, with as 
eager a bound, rode his tutor-governor — 
Raoul de Gace. Now this Ralph, Hke all the 
more energetic men of his time, had one or 
two purple patches on his soul. On his inner, 
secret list of what might be termed the strictly 
professional acts of a Norman nobleman of his 
time, he had a murder or two. Murderer 
though he had been, yet, as guardian, so pecu- 
liar was the code of personal honor in those 
days, this Ralph was rather of the ideal type. 
His boy-Duke was his Duke — he would fight 
for him to the death. 

Thus the two rode, of one mind, one sure 
and deadly purpose theirs. As they rode, they 
gathered their army about them. "Gels d'Auge 
et eels de Cingalais" ("those of the country of 
Auge and those of Cingalais," Wace tells us,) 
joined themselves to William. As he neared 
Falaise, his troops, like those Achilles had 
brought to life by a mere stamping of his heel, 
seemed to spring out of the very earth. His 
Falaisians were to find their deliverers in their 
own nobles, led by their own native-born child- 
Duke. 



l6o FALAISE 

One can imagine the outburst of enthusiasm 
at the sight of this boy leader of twelve, head- 
ing his Normans, marching through the streets 
of his town, to re-capture his own — his father's 
chief fortress. Child though he was, he is said 
to have looked and played his man's part, with 
the better verisimilitude in that he looked 
twice his age. In figure he was tall. Already 
his bearing was that of a young conqueror. 
His eyes were noticeable for their eagle-like 
size and the directness of their gaze. His 
power and skill in the use of weapons marked 
him as among the most doughty lads of the 
kingdom. On that first of his leading of his 
nobles to battle, those who had played and 
trained with him on the very ramparts they 
were now to re-capture must have remarked 
exultingly that the plains of Falaise had done 
their work well. 

William attacked his fortress from the 
Falaisian, the town side. He stormed the city 
gate — Porte-du-Chateau, and the walls about it. 
In an incredibly short space of time a breach 
was made. Before the boy's army had time to 
enter the path they had made for themselves, 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE i6l 

Toustain came to his senses. Frightened at 
so surprisingly swift a transformation of his 
boy over-Lord into a general, and one, too, com- 
manding such an exceeding multitude of brave 
men, he ignominiously begged for quarter and 
for permission to retire from the country. 

Both these favors were granted him. Once 
in possession of the fortress he loved, William's 
natural magnanimity, a magnanimity which 
was to distinguish him all the rest of his life — 
save when stung to cruelty by insult — made 
him facile in moments of victory. 

Toustain the traitor, therefore, went un- 
harmed down through the fortress gates, gloom 
and hate his following shades. Meanwhile, on 
the bright Falaisian cliffs, the air was pure and 
sweet once more. A boy with radiant face, his 
youthful senses still heady with the sense of 
conquest, re-visited every inch of his re-con- 
quered fortress. Followed by the shouting, 
exultant troops, by his nobles, now won to their 
child-Duke by clasps of steel, (for had they not 
found in this child-form a general and a Duke 
after their own heart 1) William passed in 

review the scenes of his real childhood. Across 

II 



1 62 FALAISE 

the rampart plains where he was first taught to 
play the man's part; across the airy, leaf-domed 
valleys to the rocks and gorges he had climbed ; 
across, also, to the forests where, in following 
the hunt, he had gotten his soldier's and 
huntsman's seat — all this land beneath and 
about him, was his very own. 

From out of every Norman-arched window ; 
from the guard's hall up from the chateau ter- 
races ; from all the valleys of Mont Mirat — what 
heads upon heads of soldiers, nobles, and lovely 
women ! What shouts and acclamations must 
have risen skyward ! For this child of Falaise, 
the child of sin — yes, of shame — was now the 
Dehverer, the Saviour. Bright as carven marble 
shone the figure of the young hero on the cliff. 

Here, also, let it be noted, this youthful figure, 
once having leapt to take his place in the 
drama of his time, at a single bound, as it were, 
holds it forthwith to the very end. From the 
moment of that headlong ride from Rouen, to 
the day when, across burning Mantes his horse 
stumbled and gave the Conqueror the blow that 
killed him, William holds the high historic 
place of the foremost man of his time. 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE I 63 

The use William made of his first won 
power was significant of the whole character 
of the man who, after Charlemagne and Rollo 
his grandsire, was to give to Normandy its first 
shapely moulding in the ways of law and order. 

His first act, following this, his first victory, 
was of the right heroic stamp. It is ever the 
office of the hero, in all proper drama, to reward 
virtue and to right the wTonged. Perceiving 
there was something out of ethical gear in his 
own family, William proceeded at once to do 
what was expected of him. 

As grandly and with as serene a calm as if 
awarding captured lands and booty had been 
his whole childish occupation, William immedi- 
ately proceeded to give a part of Toustain's 
lands as a marriage gift to his mother. For 
his mother needed, in this her son's hour of 
triumph, but one thing, but that she needed 
badly. William and his governor de Gace 
proceeded to fill her want. A mother, and yet 
no wife, there was nothing Arlette stood in so 
great a need of as marriage lines. 

When ladies are sufficiently highly placed, 
there are as a rule men — and brave men — 



164 FALAISE 

who find ladies in Arlette's sad plight, doubly 
rich in charms. To so fair a coin, they are more 
than willing to give the official sanction of their 
own reign. Among Toustain's train of nobles 
was a brave warrior, one Herlevin of Conteville. 

He was, therefore, a Falaisian neighbor. 
Him did William choose as lawful husband of 
his still lovely mother. 

Arlette, therefore, found her second entrance 
upon the historic stage as dramatically set as 
was the first. It was from the great fortress 
of Falaise that love came to lift her from 
obscurity to greatness. Once more, destiny, as 
if touched with a divine compassion, meted 
out to her a golden justice through the portals 
of the same great structure. There where she 
had obediently given herself up to her ducal 
lover, fulfilling the double duty of daughter and 
mother, fate had sent her that crown of woman- 
hood — a true and lawful husband by the hand 
of her bastard, though noble offspring. 

In other places besides the fortress, there- 
fore, were feasts spread, did minstrels sing, 
and was there pomp of trailing cyclades and 
jewelled splendors. 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE 165 

William, in thus assuming the role of a 
merciful destiny, thought doubtless, he might 
avert its blows from descending in his own 
direction. He could never have remembered 
the time when from his babyhood upwards, 
this blot upon his birth had not darkened his 
life. Twin-born with his earliest impressions 
of the life- whirl about him, of his ow^n half- 
accepted — more or less roughly disputed claim 
to power and pre-eminence — was this darkening 
shadow across his childish vision. The shadow 
was there where he had played on the fortress 
ramparts with the boy-nobles who, boy-fashion, 
would not fear to taunt him with a fact boys 
love to handle as their deadliest weapon of 
insult. The shadow rested upon him when he 
had stood in the presence of all his fathers 
court, and great and mighty nobles had knelt 
in homage and had kissed his child's hands; 
it had gone up with him to Paris, to the King's 
Court, where, prospective Duke as he was, he 
was duly made to feel he was not as other 
children were, whose mothers could be as com- 
fortably mentioned as the King's own wife — 
the Queen ; and all through his earlier Rouen- 



1 66 FALAISE 

nais reign, the same shadow had seemed to 
grow with his growth. He could gauge its 
direful significance and its power of making 
things harder and harder for him from the 
ever-recurring talk in council of rebellious 
nobles and rumors of the King's war upon 
his Duchy. 

For one glorious moment at the fortress 
the shadow had seemed to be lifted. With that 
first deep indrawn breath of triumphant victory 
as boy, William learned the intoxicating secret 
that power could make men afraid. Before 
the flash of a sword-blade, the lips that were 
framing " Bastard " instead would shout out 
" Conqueror." 

Had he never been " Bastard " who knows 
whether as "Conqueror" William might also 
have been great .^ The forces that mould most 
lives are sufficiently complex. If ever a life 
proved its source of impulse, the initiative of 
its fixed determination to secure a Power, a 
Place to which all must yield and bow, the 
life of William of Normandy, Bastard — and 
Duke — offers to the world its secret. 

When the strong suffer, they learn their 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE 167 

strength. William's sensitiveness to a personal 
insult was the revelation of that unceasing pur- 
suit for power so exalted that the " Conqueror" 
should blot out the " Bastard." 

It was as a refuge against the most ferocious 
attack ever attempted on the life of the young 
Duke, that Falaise was next to serve William. 

As strong natures seem to invite the attacks 
of a perverse fate, thus precipitating, as it were, 
the drama of their life and career by virtue of a 
courage and strength which, fearing nothing, 
attempt all things, so did both William and his 
beloved fortress again and again appear to 
tempt rebellion, treachery and murder to do 
their worst. 

In the year 1046 William was inspired to 
take a certain journey in his domain of Nor- 
mandy. To go as far as Valognes, up in the 
"peninsular " of Cotentin, close to Cherbourg, 
was, in William's day, to undertake a serious 
stretch of travel. 

Valognes, whose calm captures you to-day 
at the first glance, whose streets wear so 
demurely the magisterial splendor of fine 
fa9ades, great windows, curved wrought-iron 



1 68 FALAISE 

balconies, and ample porte-coclieres built ex- 
pressly for the pompous state of a provincial 
nobility ; where a tiny river ripples gently past 
the debris of fortresses, chateaux, and gar- 
dens in ruins; where, what was once a city 
full of sedan chairs, carrying real marquises 
and plumed marchionesses, councillors great in 
wigs, seneschals and governors in the magnifi- 
cence of their gowns and furbelows, — this 
the " Little Paris " of two centuries ago, is, in 
our day, but a city of the dead. Nothing and 
no one you will find in all the length and 
breadth of Valognes seems now-a-days to be 
quite fully awake. The whole town appears to 
have fallen into the traditional Sleeping Beauty 
stage. One by one its garments have fallen 
awav in raQ-s and tatters about it. 

In William's day Valognes was a part of that 
portion of Normandy which was more Danish 
than French. 

All that part of Normandy beyond Caen, 
was the headquarters of William's rebellious 
subjects. The country to the east of the river 
Dives was the more frenchified Normandy — 
the country Rollo and his " Pirates " had found 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FA LA IS E 169 

the more easily governed because of that base 
of civilization already prepared by the Roman 
occupation. But in Saxon Bayeux (a colony 
of Saxons had fled to Bayeux before the 
Danes came to conquer it) and in Danish 
Coutances and all the lands about, revolt was 
the more easily spread because of the preva- 
lence of the Teutonic turbulence among nobles 
who were still half-heathen. 

This western-most Normandy was, therefore, 
the hot-bed of William's most rebellious sub- 
jects. With his characteristic indifference to 
danger, William flung himself into the centre 
of this country of hating, intriguing, treacher- 
ous Cotentin. William's presence proved too 
great an irritant for Norman Lords whose 
fingers were never happier than when at play 
with either the dagger or the sword. Prior to 
his coming a conspiracy w^as already in process 
of development. As chief and front of the 
warming process was a cousin of William's — 
one Guy of Burgundy. This Guy, being deep 
in William's debt, was the better equipped for 
the part of villain. His pride of birth — he 
was one of the rare legitimates in the house of 



170 FALAISE 

Rollo- — made up for any trifling loss in pride 
of honor. 

The conspiracy, according to all accounts, 
was going on beautifully. Guy had agreed in 
the handsomest manner possible, in the event 
of their project being successful, merely to be 
Duke of the lands east of the Dives; the great 
Western Lords were to carve up their own 
lands — and each other, in such ways as best 
suited them. Nor could any plan have been 
more eminently satisfactory, to an expert pro- 
fessional conspirator, than the way in which 
William was to be despatched. His end was 
to be edifyingly complete. He was to be seized 
by all of the nobles. Whoever was luckiest 
was to have the stabbing of him. The plan as 
a plan, you see, was projected on the very 
broadest lines. 

Meanwhile, I presume, all the pretty manners 
and affable ways common to conspirators on or 
off the stage, who are of the truly noble villain 
stature, were being indulged in. William, 
no boy now, but, at nearly nineteen a grown 
man, w^as unquestionably made as sure of 
the devotion of these his subjects, crowd- 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE 171 

ing the court he held at the lovely town of 
Valognes, as bows, and flatteries, and servile 
homage, again and again have duped the 
cleverest men, cradling their suspicion into 
somnolence. 

It is a pity that a plot, to succeed, must 
always be talked over. That busy whispering 
of arch traitors to which we listen with patient 
indulgence, on the mimic stage, as being purely 
a dramatic necessity, is truer to fact than we 
are willing to concede. The busy whispering 
has been the cause of ruin to most of the plans 
made for the doing of evil. Could the Devil 
but teach his disciples to hold their tongues he 
yet might rule the world. 

Cousin Guy and his friends, though more 
Dane than Norman, for once forgot their 
caution. They talked — and before a fool. 
As the fool was a fool only professionally, his 
cleverness was his own to use whenever he 
found himself to be in need of his wits. Now 
history has written, not once, but again and 
again, this eulogy on Court Fools, — truth and 
courage had they, and also a most singular 
honor. 



172 FA LA IS E 

The fool at Valognes, one Galet by name, 
did not disgrace his corps. He played at his 
trade till night-fall. Then he crept to William 
under cover of the dark, and told what, as fool, 
he had heard. William, the bravest man of 
his day in all France, knew when to fly ; from 
the assassin's dagger there was but one road — 
and that one he took. 

All through the night he rode for his life, 
as well as for his Duchy's safety. Across the 
lovely country where fattest cows now munch 
the livelong day; where " manoirs," chateaux 
and huge barns break the monotony of wheat 
and rye-fields, William rode across the then 
lonely plains and through forests dim with 
heavy shade. At last, along with the dawn, 
the turrets of a friendly chateau came in sight. 
The castle belonged to the Count de Ry. 

We are not told that the Lord of Ry evinced 
the slightest surprise at the appearance of his 
own Lord and Duke, dropping, half-dead, from 
his foam-white steed, (all steeds figuring in such 
historic adventures are white,) at the somewhat 
unconventional hour of daybreak. Such sur- 
prises appear to have been as much in the 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE 173 

order of an eleventh-century day as a dropping- 
in at tea has become in our own time. 

What the chroniclers have preserved for us 
is the picturesque tableau the Lord of Ry and 
his sons immediately arranged, so to speak, as 
a fine historic group. 

The " Baron of Ry," duly records the chroni- 
cle, "gave to William a fresh mount, and called 
three squires, his sons, about him, and said to 
them ; ' Here (Veci) you see your true Lord, 
mount your steeds, and according as you owe 
me allegiance, I command you to conduct him 
as far as Falloise.' " Then he (the Baron) 
told them the road they were to take. After 
which " William and his three sons took leave 
of him." They then all four went on their way 
passing the river until they came to "Falloise " 
where they were well received and with " grant 
joie. 

Once in " Falloise," the old way of spelling 
the town, there was indeed "grant joie" among 
his "dear Falaisians " — "ses chers Falaisons." 

William, however, had little time for senti- 
ment. If at the age of twelve, it had been 
worth a governor's reign over Falaise to at- 



1 74 FALAISE 

tempt to wrench an inch of WiUiam's property 
away from him, the treachery of the Western 
Barons and his Cousin Guy's black-hearted 
scheme for doing away with him, when a full- 
grown man, had set the fiery nature of the 
young Duke aflame. 

Once more -the Chateau of Falaise was 
crowded with troops. Its dungeons and store- 
houses groaned under their burden of provis- 
ions. On hearing that the Western rebellion 
was spreading, knowing that neither Falaise 
though garrisoned in every loophole, nor could 
Rouen resist the now formidable army already 
marching past St. L6, past Bayeux — almost 
at the very gates of Caen, — what, think you, 
did William do "l Where, in this the darkest 
hour of his young and lonely state of extremity 
did he look for help? 

There, where no one save a master-mind 
among statesmen would have dreamed of 
knocking; at a door behind which, again and 
again, he had found deceit luring him to per- 
dition, and treachery w^ith its knife open, it was 
at such a hostile door that brave and far-sighted 
William went to do his knocking. 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAIS 175 

Almost as swift a ride as that which took 
him from the daggers of Valognes to Falaise 
was the one William took to Poissy, to his 
King. For it was from him, and none other, 
the subtle brain of the greatest statesman of 
his age, then barely grown to a man's maturity, 
had told William his help was to come. 

The very simplicity of William's reasoning 
proves his penetration. Already councils, 
courts, and a knowledge of the men and forces 
of his time had taught William the pregnant 
fact, that Kings and children have this trait in 
common ; that which they want for themselves 
is ever a just and true claim ; the same coveted 
by others, becomes a crime. 

Normandy, ravaged, conquered and won by 
Henry for France, was one thing; the same 
Duchy set upon by rebellious Barons, became 
an act unspeakable in disloyalty. 

Therefore, it was that " William went into 
France." Therefore also, it was, that back 
with him from Poissy rode Menry at the head 
of his French Army. 

Now^ the very prettiest bit of fighting done 
anywhere in France was to be seen on the day 



176 FALAISE 

the true Normans, with William at their head, 
and his King Henry, with his gallant French- 
men, met Guy of Burgundy, the Viscount of St. 
Sauveur, and hundreds of other great Lords and 
their troops on the plains about Val-es-Dunes. 

It was a battle after the good old order of 
knightly combats. Knight errantry w^as then 
in its dawn. The system of Knight service 
introduced later into England by William, was 
in the first full flush of its trial days. 

The youthful warriors who followed William 
and Henry out to the plains of Val-es-Dunes 
sat their huge stallions with a lordlier seat, and 
the Knights of the rebel's army bit the dust 
with a sense of deeper shame because of the 
new ritual wdiich, once the vassal baptized as 
" chevalier," decreed the weight of a personal 
responsibility. The modern idea of individu- 
alism began its long battle in this and other 
encounters where Norman met Norman, — not 
knowing, as they wielded the lance, or the 
" virile arm " of the sword, they w^ere fighting 
for other and far greater forces than merely to 
capture certain fortress-towns or stretches of 
Norman land. 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE 177 

Actors are rarely philosophers. William 
rushing in at the very thick of the action, as 
soon as his enemy was met, four leagues from 
Caen, fought with that tempestuous fury of ardor 
which ever characterized his action in battle. 
His physical power and strength of arm would 
have told in any contest. But when in the 
field, he was one of those fighters who loved 
fighting for its own sake. Wherever the con- 
test raged hottest, there William was to be 
found, mightiest among the mighty, dealing 
blows, whether of lance or of mace, that won for 
him his Dukedom, as here at Val-es-Dunes, or 
when, through the shield-wall at Senlac, he 
fought his way to the crown at Westminster. 

Valiant as were the deeds performed in this 
brilliant tourney of horsemen at Val~es-Dunes, 
William's youthful, supple, Samson-like strength 
with his lance outdid them all. Horses and 
Knights went down before him as ripe corn 
before the scythe. The Viking in his blood 
was in its true element. The old Scandina- 
vian thirst for red human blood was not 
sated until the chivalry of Normandy opposed 
to him went down in death or was made 



12 



178 FALAISE 

prisoner, before William's Norman cry of " Dex 
Aie ! " 

Great as were the services rendered by 
Henry and his army, on that memorable day, 
it was the youthful William's pure strength in 
feats of arms, his courage, and his masterly 
ways in battle that won him his true right to 
govern his Duchy. 

For after Val-es-Dunes, the Normandy west 
as well as east of the Dives, was Norman and 
William's. Rebellion within his own domain 
had been stricken unto death in the plains of 
Caen. He who first conquered his own Duchy, 
later on led his soldiers to conquest beyond his 
own domain. The Conqueror of England, as 
the historians are at pains to tell you, first 
rehearsed his great part on the plains of 
Caen and in storming the border fortresses 
of Alen9on and Brionne. 

Falaise, that had already done so much for 
its hero-Duke, was to continue to help him still. 
It was in his favorite fortress he made his prep- 
arations for that famous siege which was to be 
stained with one of the crimes of his reign. 
Great as he was, he was as sensitive as a woman 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE 179 

to ridicule. " La pel ! La pel ! " was the cry 
shouted out by the foolish citizens of Alen9on, 
as they hung upon their walls the tanner's 
hides meant to mock the mean birth of the 
greatest man in Europe. William swore " Par 
la splendeur de Dieu," — his favorite oath when 
the darker Scandinavian side of his nature was 
roused — that the burghers of Alen9on should 
"be dealt with like a tree whose branches are 
cut off with the pollarding knife." He kept 
his word. Thirty-two Alen9on citizens saw 
their feet and hands thrown across the walls 
that had been curtained with the hateful 
hides. 

After extending his Norman domains, 
William still had once again to fight his 
King, to prove to him, at the battle of Vara- 
ville, for a last final time that he, William, and 
not Henry, was to rule Normandy. 

Falaise served the Duke as a base for his 
preparations for this decisive battle. 

After Normandy was rid of home rebels and 
foreign French invaders, both the Duke and 
his fortress had intervals of rest. Such periods 
of unwonted leisure in both their histories, 



l8o FALAISE 

were utilized by William to increase the com- 
mercial prosperity of the town — as the History 
of the Great Fair proves further on ; to intro- 
duce the beginnings of agricultural security 
and civic order in the enforcing of the " Truce 
of God," and the establishment of the Curfew ; 
and in enlarging and improving the walls and 
towers of a town that had proved to him its 
worth and loyalty, not once, but a dozen times. 

When the greatest of all his adventures be- 
fell him, when into his scheming, daring 
statesman's and general's head there burst, 
full-orbed, the project for a conquering of Eng- 
land, first and foremost to his clear-tongued 
trumpet call for followers — for an army — 
there rose about the ducal leader the 
"Nobility of Falaise." 

The forests about his birthplace went also 
to the building of the ships that were to take 
his " chers Falaisians " literally to their king- 
dom beyond the sea. The Bayeux tapestry 
will show you what havoc the woodmen's axes 
did in all the woods about Falaise. When 
with their big stallions — those mighty sires of 
the Percherons — with their cider and water 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE i8l 

barrels (the same are to be seen carried along 
the roads of Dives to-day), with their leathern 
armor, pointed shields, helmets and lances — 
not forgetting the spits of meat ; when this 
great store of provisions and military equip- 
ment and all the strange motley of men Wil- 
liam gathered about him, went into the ships 
lining the Dives shores, there was scarce a house 
in Falaise but had sent its noblest male repre- 
sentative to give color to this invasion being 
truly called a Norman Conquest. 

At that weird and brutal, yet most pictur- 
esque of banquets, when, after the battle of 
Hastings, William and his " nobles," sat down 
at midnight, on the height that had been as a 
solid wall of steel, and where, as torches 
flamed, they lit the faces of the dead that had 
made that living wall, — behold the noble Sires 
d'Aubigny, de Blainville, de Bray, de Cinteaulx, 
de Courcy, Roger Marmion, and William's own 
half-brothers, Odo and Robert — all dwellers in 
or near about Falaise — counting the heads 
that were still alive. As they passed the glass, 
and the shouts of triumph rang out, acclaiming 
their Duke King and Conqueror, w^e can pic- 



1 82 FALAISE 

ture the central figure the torches Ht. Tall, 
already stout of body, fierce of eye and feature, 
and with blood-stained tunic, yet even in this 
hour, in all the heady triumph of his " Day of 
Days " William was every inch a King. His 
dignity placed him above the brutalities of the 
situation. 

Even as the torches played upon the stern 
face that rose up beneath the quiet stars, as 
calm amid the dead as among his half-frenzied 
Knights, so did William illumine, with the 
torch of his genius, his brutal, ignorant age. 
The clever, yet coarse, Norman features of his 
native land he blent into some symmetry of law 
and order. The people he conquered, dis- 
tracted, disorganized, before the light of his 
mind played upon their trouble, were harmon- 
ized into the beginnings of that great nation 
that stands to-day before civilized Europe, for 
what William's whole reign taught — the un- 
usual virtues of personal and national loyalty, 
of rectitude and a strict self-discipline. 

The last act of the Conqueror's tragic death 
gives us a final touching instance of Falaisian 
devotion. 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE 183 

After that false step of his charger among 
the burning streets of Mantes, the French 
town that, in his wrath at the French King, 
he had fired — a stumbHng that gave the King 
his death-blow — the unrelenting fate that 
hovers above greatness as carrion above the 
dead, at last had its chance for wreaking its 
vengeance. As that mighty soul passed up- 
wards out of the huge body that lay quiet 
enough, then, on its couch in the Priory of St. 
Gervais, at the ringing of the matin bells of 
Rouen's great cathedral — on that morning of 
Thursday, a ninth of September, 1087, the 
grim sisters gathered thick and close. In an 
hour the body lay, stripped ; the death chamber 
was as desolate as was the grave making ready 
at Caen. An event so mighty of import that 
the news travelled from Normandy to Sicily in 
a single day, was yet so mockingly slighted 
nearer home that neither son nor courtier was 
found to give the corpse of the greatest man of 
his age a fitting burial. 

Once more William's " dear Falaisians " 
came to their loved " Bastard's " rescue. That 
gallant Knight, Herlevin, Arlette's husband, 



184 FALAISE 

reappears upon the scene. He it was who 
arranged the details of his mighty stepson's 
strange burial. Down the Seine, where the 
ivory horns of William's Viking ancestors, a 
little more than one hundred years before, had 
been heard echoing along that " Route des 
Cygnes," the stately barge containing all that 
was mortal of that greatest of Normans who 
had completed the " Pirate's " work, drifted down 
to Caen. As by fire he had come to his death, 
so through flames he was carried to his abbey, 
the streets of Caen filling suddenly with fire 
and smoke, as the monks, in their slow rhyth- 
mic march, were chanting about the cof^n the 
ofHce of the dead. 

He who was first among Normans to claim 
his rights was, at the very last, to have the 
law of justice he had preached turn against 
him. His grave was disputed by a dispos- 
sessed owner, as he was about to be lowered 
into it. The cry of " Haro ! " that cry for jus- 
tice Rollo had taught every Norman to respect, 
was shouted above the seven feet of earth, all 
too small for the Conqueror's bulky frame. 

After the clinking of the purchase money, 



WILLIAM'S CAPTURE OF FALAISE 185 

the mortal part of William lay, for a few brief 
centuries, at rest. When, with the Revolution 
came the rage among men to prove their con- 
tempt for the greatness that had made them, 
William's grave was once more violated and 
his ashes were scattered to the Norman winds. 



CHAPTER V 

HISTORY OF THE GREAT FAIR 
I 

IN all centuries Kings and rulers have been 
under the influence of some prevailing 
mental fashion or mania. In the strenuous 
fighting days of the earlier centuries a man's 
character, when he had power, could be 
gauged by the direction in which the influ- 
ences of his time pulled him. Piety was one 
test ; the establishment of law and order was 
another. Robert the Duke, in a moment of 
calm, had felt himself stirred by the imagina- 
tive appeal spiritual impulse took in his day. 
His son William, when in command of his 
rare leisure, had the truer instinct of a ruler's 
higher duty ; he set himself the less pictur- 
esque, more unselfish task, of righting the 
wrongs and meeting the needs of his people 
at home. 



HISTORY OF THE GREAT FAIR 187 

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries there 
were four powerful fashions in thought and 
ambition. Princes then, as now, enjoyed the 
luxury of indulging their predilections in 
grander form and circumstance than lesser 
men. The building of great cathedrals ; the 
pious founding of rich men's so-called poor 
houses, known as monasteries; the establish- 
ment of fairs ; and the leading of a com- 
pany of Crusaders to the Holy Land — in any 
one or in all of these four directions, Kings, 
Dukes, and Barons might expend time and 
treasure, and look for their reward in the 
mouths of men — for flattery in those days 
was as much the fashion as criticism has 
become in our own time. 

In following three of the above-named 
fashions of his day, William the Great proved 
both his policy and his wisdom. 

William was carefully, painstakingly pious. 
He understood his century. He meant that 
the strongest organization of his time should 
be on his side. He set an example, therefore, 
to all men, of strict devotion to a religion 
which he knew how to use, in masterly fashion, 



l88 FALAISE 

as a cloak and weapon, when the time came. 
He could build, in meek obedience to Papal 
command, the two great abbeys in Caen as a 
" penance " for having married, in Mathilda of 
Flanders, the wife of his choice ; but the 
Church of Rome, in its turn, must send a con- 
secrated banner and a ring with Saint Peter's 
hair in sign of its consecration of the "holy 
war " of Normandy against England. 

In the building mania of his age so clever 
a ruler as William saw nothing but good. 
Churches, hospitals, and monasteries were in 
process of erection throughout his Duchy, 
from Cherbourg to Rouen. Quarries were 
worked as industriously as, later on, the 
forests were hewn down for the building of 
the ships that were to capture England. 

In so stirring and active a period, the com- 
mercial and financial affairs of the Duchy 
were naturally not neglected. Civic and 
military strength being a guarantee of agricul- 
tural and commercial security, Normandy soon 
became one of the chief European centres of 
trade. F'airs were the first European awaken- 
ing to the immense advantages to be gained 



HISTORY OF THE GREAT FAIR 189 

by trade centralization. What the great 
departmental stores are in our own day, the 
fairs of feudal, mediaeval, and renascent 
Europe were to their time and period. 

Of all these earlier fairs the Fair of Gui- 
bray and that of Beaucaire held, for centuries, 
in France, the foremost place. The early 
pre-eminence of Guibray was directly due to 
Robert, and later on, to the keen commercial 
instincts of William. 

In an earlier chapter Robert's cleverness in 
utilizing the miracle-drawing power of the 
Church of Guibray as the nucleus of a Fair 
was noted. This first Fair Robert placed in 
the Camp-de-Foire, close to his fortress walls. 
There, for some years, the Fair held its own 
against all neighboring rivals, increasing in 
importance with each year. William removed 
its site to the Falaisian suburb of Guibray, at 
the same time extending to it what were 
deemed extraordinary privileges for those 
exacting days. Taxes and tithes were not to 
be levied on this Fair, exceptions which were 
continued by subsequent rulers and Kings. 
As a result of such privileges, the commercial 



I90 FALAISE 

prosperity of both the Fair and of Falaise be- 
came a synonym for success. Falaise, indeed, 
owed its later prosperity to its Fair. With the 
advent of cannon its military importance was 
doomed. But the town lived on, drawing half 
commercial Europe to pass through its great 
gateways. With the advent of the railroads, 
fairs, on a large scale, have become as rare 
as the costumes that brightened them. The 

o 

commercial traveller, that carrier-pigeon who 
now follow^s all the trade winds, with his box 
of samples, has settled the problem of trade 
distribution for our era. 

Horses alone, even in our time of easy 
transportation, have been found more difficult 
of conveyance than samples of silk and linen. 
The horse- Fair, therefore, at Guibray, as my 
earlier chapters prove, still lives on. 

From the eleventh up to the middle of our 
own century, with the resistant power which 
comes with continuity, the great Fair of Gui- 
bray drew Dutch and English tradesmen; 
Spaniards with their steel and cutlery; Ger- 
mans from across the Rhine ; and Hungarians 
with their leather goods. These and their fol- 



HISTORY OF THE GREAT FAIR 191 

lowers met along the high-roads, dark-skinned 
grocers from Marseilles ; silk merchants from 
Lille and Lyons ; hosiers from Orleans ; 
clothiers from Rouen and Sedan ; and gold- 
smiths and jewellers from Paris. 

France might be at peace or at war; the 
map of Europe might be changing its outlines 
with seeming inconsequence of design ; Falaise 
itself might be passing from Norman Dukes 
to hated English rule ; or yet be opening its 
gates to welcome the conquering troops of its 
own Charles VII. — to be French forever- 
more; Protestant and Catholic might be 
shouting their creeds through the mouth of 
cannon to the stout bastions of William the 
Conqueror's great stronghold — and still, year 
after year, pigs and cattle were being prodded 
to the great market where the yellow August 
sun was to light indiscriminately, jewels from 
Paris workshops, tanned hides, silks and satins, 
glass and porcelain, and the velvet coats of 
smooth-skinned thoroughbreds. 

During three years only, did Falaise see its 
prosperity threatened. Henri III. revoked the 
edict granting its privileges to the Fair at Gui- 



192 FALAISE 

bray, ordering that the Fair should be held at 
Caen. Falaise saw ruin staring from every 
forsaken inn and deserted shop-window. Still, 
half ruined as it was, when, as a fervent Catho- 
lic it found itself asked to receive as its rightful 
King the gallant Henri IV., as one man, town 
and fortress rose to protest. Henri's Catholi- 
cism was too recent to make the religious stuff 
of which true French Kings should be made, 
thouo^ht Falaise. Once more fortress and 
town found themselves at their familiar posts. 
But recently converted Henri captured the 
fortress. To punish the town he refused to 
restore to it its vanished Fair. 

A citizen of Guibray, one Nicholas le Sas- 
sier, was inspired to a fine action. He went 
out to the King's camp at Saint Denis, threw 
himself in approved suppliant fashion at Henri's 
feet, and began an impassioned harangue. 
Being doubly a Norman, since he was also a 
lawyer, he arranged his effect with due regard 
to dramatic climax. After depicting the con- 
sternation of his fellow citizens at the disaster 
that threatened all Guibray and Falaise, he 
proceeded to tempt Henri. He made him the 



HISTORY OF THE GREAT FAIR 193 

finest of all gifts ; he presented him, with a 
large liberahty, all the youth of the town. To 
prove his sincerity he proceeded to offer up 
his own three sons. " Great Prince," he cried 
— still on his knees — " you have already 
tested their courage " (presumably in their 
character of rebels), "in you they have had 
cause to admire and to recognize a Prince yet 
more brave than they. For this reason they 
wish to attach themselves to your person for 
life." 

Henri, not to be outdone in oratorical effect, 
in his turn cried out "Go! reassure your 
town. I wished but to test her. Now that 
she submits herself, I give her back her 
Fair of Guibray, together with all the privi- 
leges and exemptions granted by my kingly 
predecessors." 

Then did the streets of Guibray and Falaise 

ring with cries of rejoicing. " Vive Henri!'' 

" Vive Henri f' was shouted till throats could 

shout no more. Louder still the belfries of St. 

Gervais and of Notre Dame de Guibray rang 

out their glad exultant chimes. 

13 



194 



FALAISE 



II 



The formal opening of the great Fair took 
place on the evening of the Assumption, di- 
rectly after the picturesque and impressive 
religious procession had passed before the 
timbered fa9ades of the streets of Falaise and 
Guibray. 

For days before the opening, trees and 
bushes along the high-roads were as regularly 
blanched, in the season of mid- August, to a 
whitened pallor by clouds of dust as, each 
spring, the oaks and elms along the road-side 
felt the rising sap stir within their veins. Like 
certain modern Parisian faces, their pallor was 
worn as proof of their fashionable maquillage. 
For fashionable, in the truest sense of the word, 
did the Fair become during the later sixteenth, 
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. 

An interesting reprint of a seventeenth-cen- 
tury engraving — the actual date of which is 
1658 — reproduces for us, with minute detail, 
this city of the Fair at the height of its season 
of two hundred and more years ago. 

All the houses that are old now, sunken of 



HISTORY OF THE GREAT FAIR 1 95 

beam, and faded in color and complexion, 
when Guibray sat for her portrait to Chavvel, 
were then bright and gay of hue. Their glossy 
timbers, zig-zag ornamentations, quaint carv- 
ings, and picturesque gabled roofs, were then 
neither quaint nor picturesque, but merely in 
the best fashion of their day. The shops of 
Falaise and Guibray were, also, then brave of 
sign. Elaborate and dainty were the conceits 
that, in iron, or carved or painted wood, were 
conveyed to you the fact that keys were fash- 
ioned, or boots were cobbled, or bread was 
made in the houses thus richly tricked out. 
Le Vieux Paris of the Paris Exhibition of 
1900, admirably reproduced the gain in street 
effects due to such mediaeval artistic signs. 
The color and vivacity contributed to street 
scenes by burghers in costume was, also, 
proved anew in that successful attempt to re- 
produce a lost period. And every fashion in 
clothes, from the short fighting tunics and flow- 
ing, fashionable cyclades of the eleventh cen- 
tury up to the fripperies of the Directoire 
period have passed beneath the two Falaisian 
gates of Le Comte and Bocey. 



196 FALAISE 

When Chavvel's pencil traced the fashions 
of his day, it was to reproduce the elaborate 
gowns, wide and stiff-skirted, in which Anne 
of Austria charmed Buckingham and Mazarin. 
Her enemies and rivals, those lovely Duchesses 
who had fouo-ht her in the Fronde, wearied, 
perhaps, of intrigues and conspiracies, might 
have been caught descending from their 
coaches at the Fair entrances. Chatelaines 
for miles about the lovely Calvados region, and 
from far beyond its confines, came up as regu- 
larly on shopping expeditions to the Bon 
Marche of their day, as ladies from San Fran- 
cisco or Chicago step across the water to line 
the modern Parisian shop counters. There is, 
indeed, the same concentrated energy of pur- 
pose and intent fixity to be read in the carriage 
and walk of these stately seventeenth-century 
dames who crowd the Guibrayan streets as we 
may note any day, from April to October, in 
the carriage of our fair compatriots who con- 
tribute a brighter lustre to La Rue de la Paix 
than does its array of sparkling gems. What- 
ever instability caprice may suggest to a v/o- 
man's emotional machinery, in her indefatigable 



HISTORY OF THE GREAT FAIR 197 

pursuit of the fashions her ways are as fixed 
as is the orbit of the North Star. 

The gallants of those days wore feathered 
hats, mantles, lace jackets and high boots. 
Their rapiers and swords seem as appropriate 
to a Normandy Fair in hot August as is a 
gentleman's evening wear to a dinner in mid- 
summer in our own period. Peasants and 
beggars ; cavaliers on caracoling steeds that 
must have carried as great a dismay to the foot 
passengers in these narrow streets as do the 
modern automobiles to affrighted pedestrians 
in our own thoroughfares ; stately coaches ; 
carts of every size and description ; men and 
women, farmers and boys riding pillion with 
baskets between ; huntsmen or nobles with fal- 
con on wrist — the latter betokening the rank 
of the rider; farmers leading huge stallions in a 
string, riders thrown, others mounting, still 
others in the act of dismounting at the inn 
doors — before us, as in a glass, you may look 
upon the counterfeit presentments of the 
people who went up that older Fair. 

Acrobats made things lively for one group 
of passers-by; soothsayers were then as obvi- 



IqS falaise 

ously eagerly listened to as their tribe have 
ever been, whether it be in wise Greece, in 
sceptical Rome, or in our own highly civilized 
state of cultivated unbelief. On the boards of 
an open air improvised theatre, an actor hatted 
and cloaked, declaimed in an attitude full of 
grace, either verses or a tale. His audience 
was as motionless and attentive as ever the 
talented Monsieur Coquelin has faced when 
giving one of his incomparable monologues 
before the smart world. And in the beuvettes 
(drinking stalls) just beyond the theatre group, 
a sport and pastime as old as Adam were 
indulged in. In rustic thatched sheds, where 
cider barrels much wider than the tables were 
all the advertisement needed, apparently, every 
Jack appeared to have his Jill, as the necessary 
complement to his glass. Just as in the Expo- 
sition of this year of our Lord 1900, where strol- 
ling couples, confident in the distractions offered 
to sightseers, within the magical grounds did 
their courting with the most innocent publicity, 
so through the long centuries have lusty Nor- 
man peasants felt their lovers' arms about their 
waists, and the crimson of their cheeks and lips 



HISTORY OF THE GREAT FAIR 199 

crushed — in full daylight, without thought of 
shame. 

In the more fashionable inns and hostelries 
one can picture the archers of the earlier 
centuries and the inousquetiers of a later one, 
off duty, come to ask farmers and merchants 
the news of Europe: whether in this year of 
1658, Turenne was still friends with Cromwell, 
and how Mazarin was now Q^overnino^ France 
and the Queen. For fairs were to feudal and 
later Europe what the newspapers and cable- 
grams are to us, — the gossiping distributors 
of news. Fashions, also, in customs and in 
architecture, political opinions and convictions 
were as moulded and fashioned by such large 
assemblages of men, as they are now by the 
prevailing travelling mania and the press. 

Of the swarm of the gentry and nobility who, 
as late as 1830, continued to pack the narrow 
Guibrayan streets, the historian Galeron gives 
us a vivid picture. " So crowded and so great 
is the noise that the first days of the Fair are in 
truth insupportable. In the midst of so great 
a concourse of people, it is impossible for any- 
thing like order to reign — one is shoved. 



200 FALAISE 

pushed, knocked about, pitched into at every 
turn by horses, coaches, carriages, and by por- 
ters hurrying in all directions at once." The 
larger streets were " packed with lookers-on, 
with saunterers, with eager buyers, all day and 
far into the night. Women appear in gorgeous 
apparel, and the gallants in their train are no 
less splendidly turned out." Fashion makes 
its newest and latest bow, and " happy indeed 
are those who distinguish themselves by the 
good taste of their costume and the grace and 
ease of their bearing and manners." 

In the ante-revolutionary days, monasteries 
w^ere as full of " guests " as wxre the neighbor- 
ing chateaux with costlier company ; for old 
customs die hard. Those two most formidable 
rivals to the inn-keeper's trade, the abbe and 
the seigneur, were difficult to kill; and in a 
town as hard pressed as was Falaise for that 
fortnight of its Fair, the cool chambers of the 
rich abbeys in and about Falaise must have 
been as full of gallants and gay ladies as their 
cells and cloisters were of money-making 
monks. 

The sandals and girdles of cowled men were 



HISTORY OF THE GREAT FAIR 201 

no unusual adjuncts to the crowds frequenting 
the Fair-town. For the monk of the middle 
ages was as great a tavern and Fair haunter as 
any other idler. When the glass was passed, 
or the dice came out, no better judge of 
luck, or keener gambler than those roistering 
monks so dear to the nineteenth-century fancy 
and fiction. Scholars as well as the monks 
rubbed shoulders with the seigneurs, the 
soldiers, and the merchants, who, among other 
attractions, could count on the filles de joie 
presenting the pathos of their tragic gayety. 

Lower still lay that darker social sediment 
all crowds bring in their train. Cut-purses, 
pedlars, adventurers, pardoners, charlatans, 
quacks, and the dealer in false relics, — for all 
such the bailiffs of Guibray and Falaise were 
kept on duty night and day. The jails that 
were empty would be filled, stocks would be 
found too few in number, and the gallows 
yonder, on the clear hillside, would, after the 
Fair was done, have gruesome company. 

Such have been the groups of men that have 
passed through the streets of Guibray. The 
sounds of their noisy, crowded moment of life 



202 FALAISE 

are gone. The whirr of their traffic is silenced. 
Though the town they filled is still standing — 
street upon street still opening out before you 
— all is as silent as a grave. The Citv of the 

O J 

Fair is now a City of the Dead. 

As now one wanders through these mute 
and melancholy streets, one starts at a sound. 
Where once the wealth of Europe lay, rotting 
timbers gape and yawn. Where shone the 
glint of steely arms and armor, dazzHng the 
eyes of our late sixteenth-century warrior- 
dandies, now no more harmful blades than 
those of a pale and weedy grass affright and 
charm the gaze. 

The once bustling inns are as silent now as 
is the cemetery yonder. Here and there, 
where the film of phantom insects dances in 
the summer haze, a creaking sign disperses 
the revellers. Le Grand Titrc still swings its 
bleared and faded portrait of a turbaned gen- 
tleman of color. LAigle d'Ors wide open 
doors invite you, as of old, to enter ; you and 
the ghosts may have the silent chambers, the 
empty halls, and rotting stable-stalls to your- 
selves. 



HISTORY OF THE GREAT FAIR 203 

From some of the stouter-built houses there 
win come to you the whirring noise of machin- 
ery in motion. Through the narrow windows, 
above a row of house plants, you may look 
upon strangely whirling figures. What man- 
ner of man is that in close fitting jersey, wan 
of face, whose tireless motion is as ceaseless as 
that of a Dancino^ Dervish ! Is it indeed 
some ghost of the past, rewarmed to life by 
this fine summer air? Such are the figures 
of those cotton spinners who, seeking cheap 
quarters, have sought refuge in this silent 
city. They, and the mangy dogs, scenters of 
decay, alone people the deserted streets. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 
I 

AN interesting proof of the wealth of 
France in mediaeval monuments is pre- 
sented with striking effect at Falaise. On 
these brio-ht cliffs are two survivals of feudal 
Normandy, each in its way unique among 
European curiosities. The little city of the 
Fair must stand almost alone as a record of 
bygone ways in commercial dealings. On 
the prow, so to speak, of the boat-shaped rock 
on which both Falaise and its chateau are 
built, there still stands, virtually intact, its 
chief glory, the magnificent eleventh-century 
fortress. 

Both the city of the Fair and the chateau 
have outlived their uses. Yet both present to 
our investigating nineteenth-century eyes whole 
periods of history as only stone and mortar can 



THE CHATEAU DE FA LA IS E 



205 



reproduce them. If the tottering houses of 
Guibray look the very picture of neglect and 
decay, the chateau preserves, with pecuKar dis- 
tinction, its look of power. 




The Walls a7id Bastions of the For'tress. 

The Chateau of Falaise offers to the eye 
none of those delicacies of outline and refine- 
ment in traceries which later strongholds — 
built in the period of transition from the archi- 
tecture of defence to that of pure elegance — 
wdll reveal. Falaise is staunchly, uncompro- 
misingly feudal. It embodies the bold defi- 



206 FA LA IS E 

ance, the self-confidence, the readiness of 
resource of its Norman builders. The in- 
trinsic character of the chateau remains intact. 
Its fine feudal air is inherent, in no way depend- 
ent on accessory or accident of ornament. 

From the point of view of feudal Europe, 
such a situation as that of the Donjon or 
Chateau of Falaise was absolutely ideal. 
Its front of cliff, breasting the plain below, 
with the further natural fortification of its 
neighbor cliffs, was a fortress site in a thou- 
sand. The town within the wall girdle, set 
about with trees, full of fountains, gardens, 
houses, Norman and Gothic sculptured 
churches — such a town, so tightly clasped 
by its stout stone arms, seemed as secure as 
a sanctuary. 

The history of Falaise Is the history of the 
truth and fallacy of that belief. Its chateau, 
or fortress, experienced the vicissitudes com- 
mon to all structures that stand for an idea. 
Such buildings last as long as they continue 
to typify the ideal of strength current among 
the chief military minds of their day. Every 
form of fortification is but the last experiment 



THE CHATEAU DE FA LA IS E 207 

devised by man for protection against attack. 
Europe, from the Mediterranean to the North- 
ern Seas, has been the vast arena on which, 
one after another, conflicting military convic- 
tions have been fought out to a finish. For 
centuries the experiment of making man a 
power behind a shield — whether it were that of 
the fortress wall or of an oblong bit of steel — 
studded Europe with fortified towns. When 
in battle array, men and horses, encased as 
they were in armor, were each in themselves 
a species of movable fortification. When can- 
non came in the true combat between walled 
towns and men in iron casings, and the ball 
that flies, was begun, to leave man pitiably un- 
protected before balls that travel now with 
almost the velocity of light. 

II 

That the rock of Falaise was a fortified camp 
long before the Normans saw in its site a for- 
midable military outpost, is a disputed point. 
The romantic, less exacting writers of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries have set 



208 FALAISE 

Falaise as^ainst a backo^round as full of les^end- 
ary figures as it is tinted in mystical hues. 
The theory that the grandchildren of Noah 
settled this region alone will satisfy those 
whose love of antiquity is fashioned upon such 
pages of Deuteronomy as treat solely of gene- 
alogy. To others, less insistent on a Biblical 
descent, the mystic Isis of the Druids emerges 
as the divinity whose temple was here fash- 
ioned by nature itself. Boat-shaped, the great 
rock was the temple of temples for the god- 
dess whose symbol was a ship. To the Dru- 
ids and their mysticism succeeded the Gauls, 
and to them the Romans. Langevin will tell 
you, with edifying sense of security, that no 
less a personage than Julius C^sar himself 
erected the first fortress of Falaise, to serve him 
as a base for the further subjugation of the 
westernmost part of the country then known as 
Armorique. The very word donjon this his- 
torian complacently accepts in evidence of the 
illustrious birth of his home-fortress, translating 
quasi domus yulii into " Maison de Jules." 

In such company one feels one's self to be 
archaeologically agreeably remote. But the 



THE CHAtEAU DE FALAISE 209 

first authentic appearance of Falaise across 
the page of history unfortunately dispels that 
pleasurable feeling in finding Falaise as old as 
possible. 

It is in the year 946 that we find the first 
mention of Falaise in the Norman Chronicle. 
" I have heard," said Bernard the Dane, to 
Louis d'Outre Mer, " that you wish to give 
to Hue-le-Grand all the country beyond the 
Seine which (country) contains the flower of all 
the fortresses, good towns and chivalry. In 
this country are grown the provisions for 
Rouen and its neighbor towns ; in this coun- 
try are Avrances, Coutances, Bayeux, etc. etc., 
Caen and Falaise, and many other good towns 
and chateaux." 

I, for one, am entirely content to accept 
Bernard the Dane's word that Falaise, in the 
now sufficiently remote tenth century, was 
already a flourishing town. From the above 
quoted conversation until the year of 1027-28, 
Falaise is rarely mentioned. Already in the 
time of Rollo's sons she was the chief town in 
the ''compte " of Hiesmois, a town that became 
formidable with the walls Richard the Fearless, 



2IO FA LA IS E 

third Norman Duke, built about the town 
itself. He greatly enlarged and strengthened 
the donjon, or chateau, as such strongholds 
were called in that day. 

These feudal chateaux were in no sense the 
elaborate structures that arose in later times. 
In the days of the earlier Dukes, such castles 
were often mere defences of wood surrounded by 
a ditch. But the possession of even the ruder 
forts or chateaux made every Baron owning 
one formidable. He could defy his over-Lord, 
or sally forth to carry death or destruction to 
neighbor. Lord, or innocent serfs, and generally 
overawe and terrify. 

In studying the structure of so redoubtable 
a stronghold as was the Chateau of Falaise 
w^e are at once struck wdth its amazing sim- 
plicity of design. It belongs to the earlier 
ruder periods of Norman workmanship, — to 
the period which, a little later, covered Eng- 
land with Norman castles or keep-towers. In 
all such buildings there was a general uniform- 
ity of plan. The Tower of London and the 
Norman keep at Newcastle-on-Tyne are two 
admirable surviving examples of such Towers 



THE ChA tea U DE FA LAIS E 2 I I 

in England. The Chateau of Falaise differed 
somewhat from these later donjons. Owing 
to the natural advantages of its site, to its 
great height above the vale, and to the further 
defences offered by the heights of Noron and 
of Mont Mirat, w^iose near cliffs closed about 
the Falaisian spur of rock like bristling senti- 
nels, the fortress could remain exceedingly 
simple in its construction. Its square mass of 
stone work measured about sixty feet to the 
square, its elevation varying from fifteen to 
sixty feet. The northern and southern fa9ades 
were buttressed in all their length by rude 
but enormously strong buttresses. The chief 
strength of the building lay in its walls, still 
to be measured at nine feet nine or ten inches. 
In certain parts of the donjon these walls are 
in fact double walls with the intervals filled 
wdth rubble, and v^dth passages in them. 
There is a fine wide stairway in the south- 
western wall wide enough for two men-at-arms 
to walk abreast. The massiveness of the en- 
closing outer walls gives, perhaps, as does no 
other part of the structure, the impression of 
the strength that may come with the mere 



2 12 FALAISE 

building of stone on stone. The Normans, 
in utilizing their walls for inner passages and 
stairways, unquestionably copied in this their 
cleverer predecessors, the Romans. In the 
third and fourth centuries the fortifications 
of Rome had such passages in them, the 
inner wall being made of very fine brick 
work. 

There are no refinements of taste or skill in 
mason's work discoverable in the original keep 
of Falaise. Everything about the structure 
proclaims it as the work of the Norman in his 
rude elementary stage as builder. Its origin 
belonged to that crude period when the North- 
men, feeling still insecure in this not wholly 
subdued land of " Neustria," made self-protec- 
tion the first of all laws. Rebuilt and restored 
as has been the fortress in certain portions, its 
walls and the masonry of its inner walls show, 
by the most telling of all proofs, that a large 
part of the famous structure still remains as 
the Normans built it. The rubble, the wide- 
jointed masonry, the roughness of the stone 
work, are all early Norman work. 

Such ornament as the original keep still 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 213 

shows proclaims the work of the axe rather 
than of the chisel. The two round-headed win- 
dows facing the north, overlooking the Val- 
dante ; the round-arched doorways with shafts 
with their plain or cushion capitals ; the 
roughly sculptured heads in the angles, close 
to the rudely modelled window moulding; — all 
this is Norman work in its primitive stage of 
development. 

In the small upper room, famous as the 
meeting-place of Robert and Arlette, and the 
birth-chamber of their illustrious child, — a fact 
still stoutly contested by most of the English 
historians, — in this room the vaulting is the 
groined vault without ribs, the very sign and 
seal of earliest eleventh-century work. 

One looks in vain for traces of that Byzan- 
tine influence in richness of ornamentation 
which gave to the Norman architecture of sixty 
or seventy years later such splendor, semi- 
barbaric as was the character of that splendor. 
The original keep as a w^hole, one must con- 
clude, was the work of a single period, and that 
period the time of William and his immediate 
successors. 



2 14 FALAISE 

In its outer defences, Falaise neither pre- 
sented, nor indeed did she need to present, any 
of those more elaborate devices we find in later 
donjons. Such records as we have of the 
structural character of the gates and the walls 
show none of the ingenious " curtain walls," 
double and triple moats which Coucy (1228) or 
Pierrefords (1390) present. The whole system 
of defence at Falaise was based on the principle 
of the impregnable character of its rocky cliff 
front. Its walls with their watch towers, bas- 
tions, and outer and inner gateways offer 
evidence of no more intricate devices than the 
almost elementary ones of forcing the enemy to 
present its flank to the warriors on the battle- 
mented heights. 

With its forty towers, its six city gates, the 
tower-studded walls of the town, moats, ponds, 
drawbridges and portcullises, Falaise might 
well count on withstanding all assaults save 
one — that of grim-visaged famine. 

The interior of the donjon is still divided on 
the first floor into large and small halls, the 
guard rooms ; its upper story into small cham- 
bers, where the Dukes, under Norman rule, and 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 215 

English governors and captains during the 
Enghsh occupation, retired to rest after tlie 
long hunts, or to sleep during prolonged sieges ; 
in the southern fa9ade was the chapel, small 
and vaulted, in the old days only to be entered 
from without ; and below all, the dungeons in 
the living rock. The dwelling-house, the true 
chateau of our more modern days, now the 
college, was within the walled enclosure. 

Secret and subterranean passage-ways led 
from the fortress to the town, and from the 
town into the outer country. All of which 
precautions suggest to us our own more envi- 
able state of security. Perhaps it is rather the 
policeman's club than either free education or 
republican institutions which is the corner 
stone of a true state of civilized society. Even 
in times of peace, in such an over-protected 
town as Falaise, one must have had disagreeable 
reminders, at every turning, of what it all 
meant. In those days war came home, person- 
ally, to every hearth and household. Pillage, 
rapine, fire — these were the demons that over- 
leapt the walls when walls crumbled. 



2l6 FALAISE 



III 



When the EngHsh King, Henry V., made 
the first true capture of Falaise, taking the 
fortress that had already weathered seven 
sieges, by the force of cannon, he made his 
great Captain, Jean Talbot, Governor of the 
fortress. With the revival of English rule, 
great changes and many additions were made 
to the keep. The revolution in military tac- 
tics and methods of warfare brought about by 
the introduction of cannon demanded that all 
fortresses built on the plan of the older Keeps 
must be changed, or strengthened, to meet the 
new dangers from the cannon mouth. 

The building of Talbot Tower was the im- 
mediate outcome of the new military necessity. 
Its shape was fashioned somewhat after the 
Norman Round Church Towers so common in 
Norfolk and Suffolk. But all resemblance 
ceased with this similarity of form. 

Talbot Tower, although built in an incredi- 
bly short period of time, is one of the master- 
pieces of military architecture. The delicacy 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 



217 



of its design, its grace and symmetry, both of 
proportion and elevation, proclaim it, at a 
glance, as a structure possessing the elements 
and finish of a perfect work of art. The eye 
rests upon it in 
satisfied delight. 
Its springing 
lightness makes 
its strength seem 
accident rather 
than design. 
And from what- 
ever point of 
view one tests 
its beauty — 
whether fro m 
the vale below 
one watches it 
soar heaven- 
wards, with imitative aerial lightness; or whether 
one fronts it from the Noron heights, where its 
columnar symmetry outrivals the sunlit tree- 
trunks ; or if, nearer still, the eye, in pure fas- 
cination of watching the line of perfect grace 
grow from the flanging base to the melting 




The Fortress ajid Talbot Tower. 



2l8 FALAISE 

roof and cornice lines — from whatever point 
or distance one looks upon Talbot Tower, one 
finds it flawless. 

The masons' work alone is a marvel of stone 
laying, the entire surface of the Tower having 
the finish of the later Renaissance work. Its 
height of one hundred and eleven feet is 
divided into four stories, five, including the 
dungeons in the rock wall. In the middle of 
the Tower is an opening running from base to 
summit. This opening was for the working of 
the deep well, which made the Tower quite in- 
dependent of the chateau, in case the garrison 
should be forced to sustain a last attack in 
these narrower quarters. As in the older 
keep, the stairways are inter-mural, being cir- 
cular in this smaller building. The subdivis- 
ions of the various floors conform to the 
necessities of the housing of many men in 
so comparatively confined a space. Small 
chambers, with stone seats in the deeply re- 
cessed windows ; a subterranean dungeon, and 
a single upper room boasting of a wide fire- 
place: such was the interior of the structure. 

For further protection against surprise in 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 219 

case the chateau were taken, an enormously 
thick wall separated the Tower from the older 
stronghold. In this wall, in times of peace, a 
passage way led from keep to Tower. But in 
times of siege all communication was cut off. 
The commander and his garrison, with their 
stores of provision and ammunition in the deep 
dungeons beneath, with their well of pure 
water and behind their armor of walls ten feet 
thick, could count upon holding out for months 
against the still crude artillery of the fifteenth 
century. 

The chateau itself, at the period of the build- 
ing of the great tower, was entirely restored. 
The chapel of the chateau, almost a ruin, was 
also rebuilt. Not content with all this build- 
ing and rebuilding, Talbot proceeded to beau- 
tify and adorn his own particular chambers. 
Les Salles Talbot were still rich in faded fres- 
cos and late Gothic ornamentations only a 
short fifty years ago. The Gothic-arched 
windows with their chiselled trefoil openings 
contribute the sole notes of elegance to the 
chateau structure. The older historians are 
lavish of descriptions concerning this Talbot 



2 20 FALAISE . 

Hall. The English governor, obviously, had 
brought to Falaise, along with his English 
garrison and mounted men-at-arms, — the 
record of whose pay in golden francs — francs 
dor — you still may read in M. de Malherbes' 
manuscript records — along with his English 
horse and English rule, Talbot had carried to 
the fortress on the hill his English love of com- 
fort. The wide open fire-place in this his 
French hall must have recalled to him those 
generous hearths where the leaping flames 
warmed English hearts. As the fire's glow 
lit the painted walls of his great room, fusing 
the splendor of the rich interior into harmony, 
Talbot's days and months of exile from Eng- 
lish courts and the ease of castle life must 
have been, at least, somewhat mitigated. 

IV 

To peruse the further history of the fortress, 
after the disappearance of the most striking 
and masterful of all the great personages who 
strode across the historic Falaisian stage, from 
the rise of the curtain after William the 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 221 

Conqueror's death, to its fall with Napoleon 
the Great's hasty and disdainful sojourn of a 
few hours in the town, is to pass in review the 
long possession of human passions. Filial dis- 
loyalty succeeded William's briUiant example 
of right conduct in domestic relations. On his 
death bed, true with his last breath to his sense 
of justice, William avowed "though he foresaw 
the wretchedness of any land over which 
Robert should be ruler," yet he could not keep 
his eldest son from his birthright — the ducal 
crown of Normandy. Robert, therefore, as 
rightful heir of his Norman father received at 
Rouen the sword, the mantle and the crown 
that made him Duke of Normandy and Count 
of Maine. The sword he used to such purpose 
against the Saracens in the first great Crusade 
of 1095 that he was offered the crown of Jeru- 
salem. Thirteen years after his coronation, at 
the battle of Tinchebraye, his mantle was 
trailed in the dust, and his ducal crown ex- 
changed for one of martyrdom. 

The contradictions in Robert's character 
brought the same disasters to his duchy that 
complex and weak natures — who are strong 



222 FALAISE 

only in melodramatic situations — are certain 
to precipitate. Robert could wantonly bring 
about and foster the only difference William 
and Mathilda ever experienced; yet he could 
gather about him, a few years after his accession 
to the Dukedom, an army six hundred thousand 
strong, heading this force, which included all 
the brave Norman nobles, with such gallant 
bravery that Niceae, Antioch, and finally Jerusa- 
lem went down before him. 

The empty honor of having refused to be 
King of Jerusalem could hardly have been of 
staying comfort to Robert when he returned to 
his " beloved Normandie," and found to what a 
pass, by his ow^n acts, he had brought her. He 
had mortgaged Normandy to his brothers 
William and Henry. From that mortgage 
dates the tragedy of disputed possession which 
made this donjon on a hill a target, for 
centuries, for English bowmen and French 
archers. 

The history of the Chateau of Falaise from 
the year iioo to 1450, is the history of the 
quarrels that arose as to who, after William the 
Great's second son had immediately seized his 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 223 

mortgaged territory, should thereafter own and 
hold Falaise. 

The quarrel was sufficiently lively during 
the lifetime of William the Conqueror's three 
turbulent sons. The difference in family 
opinion as to who was rightful owner of the 
cliff fortress was decided at Tinchebraye. But 
Falaise, loyal to its rightful Duke, would 
receive no English Kings — for Henry, Con- 
queror of Robert, was English born. Loyalty 
is usually strongest in the strong; and Falaise 
could afford the luxury of fighting or sulking 
for her principles behind walls of such thick- 
ness as hers. At Robert's commands to 
receive Henry, however, she opened her gates. 

Once the English foot on Norman soil, and 
rivers of good English and Norman blood 
were to flow before Normandy learned the 
hard lesson, that to be safe, — and saved — she 
must be French. 

In the next three hundred years what a 
multitude of historic personages crowd the 
Falaisian heights ! As successor to the des- 
potic-featured Henry I., his greater son Henry 
n. appears as Duke of Normandy, and King of 



2 24 FALAISE 

England. It was Henry II.'s wise custom to 
celebrate the Christmas, Easter and Whitsun- 
tide festivities in Normandy. Falaise, the town, 
the chateau, and the surrounding country wore 
their gayest Christmas dress to fete the dark- 
eyed, long-visaged Eleonora, her suite of 
ladies, and her royal husband when, in 1159, 
the Ens^lish Court came to the castle to make 
merry. 

The clever, subtle face of Thomas a Becquet 
peers at us through the donjon's arched win- 
dows. For in 1162 he was signing Henry's 
State papers in his quality of Chancellor- 
Thoma Cancellario is the signature you may 
still read on certain papers dated " Falloise." 
At the time of the sojourn of the English 
Court at Falaise, Henry and his beloved arch- 
bishop were the best of friends. Doubtless 
one might have seen the two, any fine day, 
walking about the ramparts, talking, in most 
amical fashion, about the rights of bishops and 
the liberties of the church, — the very questions 
that, only eight years later, discussed in differ- 
ent mood and temper, led to Henry's historic 
exclamation, " I find myself indeed unfortu- 



THE CHATEAU BE FALAISE 225 

nate ! Surrounded with officers and subjects 
on whom I have lavished favors — and yet 
there is not one to rid me of this persecuting 
priest ! " 

From the dark tragedy under the aisles at 
Canterbury that was the consequence of that 
unlucky outburst, and the subsequent troubles 
of Henrys domestic life and reign, it is a re- 
lief to turn to a certain other festivity held by 
his son at the Chateau of Bure. Six hun- 
dred knights, each bearing the name of 
William — Gziillaume — and all the squires 
and serving-men, as well as the guests at 
separate tables, all also answering to the name, 
sat down to make merry at the gay Christmas 
time. The Court of Normandy, at that time, 
was certainly not dependent on any English 
contingent for its brilliancy and numbers. 

The chief figure of the time, Richard the 

Lion Heart, was never seen at Falaise. He 

contented himself with assi2:nino: the town and 

chateau to his wife Berenice, as part of her 

dowry. Richard took more interest in his 

Chateau Gaillard than in Falaise. " Quelle 

est belle, ma fille d'un an ! " he exclaimed, after 

15 



2 26 FALAISE 

the astonishingly quick completion of the first 
true rival to Falaise's supremacy among im- 
pregnable heights. 

His brother and successor, John, contented 
himself with the making of any number of 
royal entrances to Falaise. No less than five 
times in the space of as many years did the 
loyal town hang its streets with carpets and 
embroidered linen and curtain its churches 
with rich cloths. Royal as were Jean Sans- 
Terre's tastes, his luxurious nature felt no 
qualms when it came to murder. Pale, sad- 
eyed Arthur of Brittany, who, alive, was a 
perpetual source of uneasiness to the uncle 
who had confiscated his estates, spent the only 
happy months of his long imprisonment within 
the w^alls of the chateau. It was deemed the 
Falaisians were indeed too kind ; the royal 
youth, therefore, was taken to Rouen. Even 
there no Norman could be found to do the 
dreadful deed. " I am a nobleman, not an 
executioner," had been the reply of the Sieur 
Guillaume de Briouze, when King John 
suofsrested to the latter how one whom he had 
loaded with favors could help him. What no 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 227 

Norman subject would do, a Norman Duke 
could and did. In the Rouen Tower by the 
Seine, where Joan of Arc was imprisoned, 
John's dagger found Arthur's heart. The 
dark deed, no sooner done, than it began to 
breed a darker vengeance. Philip Augustus, 
the French King, and Arthur's father-in-law, 
took the surest means of punishing the awful 
crime. Having, in loyal feudal fashion, first 
summoned John to appear before his peers 
at the French Court, to answer for his crime, 
and John having refused to deliver himself up 
to certain condemnation, the latter's fief of 
Normandy was, therefore, declared forfeited — 
for fiefs, according to laws governing feudal- 
ism, were lost by rebellion, felony, or treason. 
Philip Augustus, at the head of a fine army, 
then proceeded to make good his sentence. 
He took by assault not only the Chateaux of 
Conches, Audely and of Radepont, but also the 
" saucy castle," the " beautiful girl of a year," 
Richard's Chateau Gaillard. Next Falaise, the 
key of Lower Normandy, was attacked. 

Who knows what might have happened had 
not John been a fool as well as a murderer? 



2 28 FALAISE 

He fled to England, leaving a stranger to head 
the defence of Falaise, for in outlining the plan 
of resistance of Falaise he committed the irre- 
parable folly of unsettling the town by giving 
its command to a foreigner. Falaise, always 
loyal, and having double reason to remain true 
to a prince who, however cruel he might be, 
at least had given to Falaisians their corner- 
stone of municipal freedom, suffered a quick 
revulsion of feeling. Incensed at their Duke's 
disdain, and outraged at being led against their 
French King by a Belgian, a mercenary, the 
Falaisians prepared reprisals as clever as they 
were effective. 

For seven days they allowed the King 
Philip Augustus to spread out his war machin- 
ery beneath the chateau. The French stand- 
ards flew in a half circle, close to the great 
walls. And meanwhile Falaise, over her 
battlemented heights, smiled a malicious, know- 
ing smile. For her citizens, after the seventh 
day, quietly marched down to Philip's camp, 
delivering up to him the town and castle. 
Their recorded reason for the capitulation is 
rich in meaning: " They liked better to render 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 229 

up the fortress intact, and to preserve their 
properties and the Hberties of the town than to 
be Normans ! " 

Normans had made them ; had led them to 
fight at Varaville against France ; had fired 
Norman greed and ambition to conquer Eng- 
land ; and the same Norman leadership had 
brought from the Holy Land the spiritual and 
temporal aureole of the crown of Jerusalem to 
be refused by their Norman Duke. By the 
very perversity of that fate which seems to 
delight in mixing good with evil, to this last 
true Duke, they owed the very concessions 
and privileges which had made the new word 
" Liberty " stronger than loyalty, their new 
rights better worth fighting for than the barren 
honor of continuing the reign of Rollo's race 
on Norman soil. 

With this their first assertion of a true inde- 
pendence of spirit, a new and vigorous life 
begins at Falaise. The new ideal of citizenship 
had begun to fire the minds of burghers and 
householders. In the camp before Falaise, m 
castris apttd Falesiain, Philip confirmed the 
charter of the town's true birth. As French- 



230 FA LA IS E 

men these Normans were to circulate and traffic 
freely throughout the kingdom — the town of 
Mantes alone excepted. The " Commune," 
granted by John, was thus confirmed. 

With the passing of Normandy to the French 
crown, an entirely new destiny came to Falaise. 
Hitherto, she had been one of the chief jewels 
in the ducal crown. As such she had been a 
town and a castle to be used as her owner 
willed. Her citizens' and nobles' blood must 
be spilled, their property at the mercy of pillage 
or plunder, in battles that were none of their 
making. 

Meanwhile, during all the years of this 
former feudal servitude, other battles, not 
fought with the lance and bow, were bringing 
deliverance to Falaise. 

The tanners and cotton dyers, and later the 
cutlers, working as best they might ; forced to 
fly to the narrower town streets for refuge in 
times of siege ; yet, persecuted as they and 
their dwellings were by pillage and fire, were 
they and their commerce growing year by year 
in power and importance. Against the tyranny 
of the feudal system, a slow but mighty power 



THE CHATEAU DE FA LA IS E 23 I 

was thus in process of formation. Humble pigs 
and cattle, the horses, always in demand in a 
town as constantly at war ; and the long proces- 
sion of the merchants with their merchandise, 
going up year after year to the Fair at Guibray, 

— these were the forces arrayed for the battle 
waged by burghers for freedom and "privileges;" 

— "rights" these became only when the privi- 
leges were once granted. The first great con- 
quest was when, in 1203, Jean Marechal was 
nominated " baillif " of the town ; hitherto all 
civic affairs had had to be decided by the mili- 
tary commander or Vicomte of the Duchy. 
Such was the beginning of those other " rights " 
that came about with the gradual development 
of true citizenship, with the institutions of 
the " Communes," and " L'Echiquier de Nor- 
mandie," the latter a sort of ambulatory court 
of justice, composed of prelates, abbots, and 
lords. 

Thus w^e see Falaise emerging from the 
anarchy of feudalism into that period of tran- 
sition during which the chaotic forces in society 
were being resolved into law and order. This 
small and now almost forgotten town con- 



232 FA LAIS E 

tributed another element to the growth of 
modern society. If in the tiny bee beneath 
the donjon the dipping of hides in dye was 
to brino^ that wealth to Falaise which made 
her "rights" worthy the consideration of Kings, 
on her chateau plains other " rights " were 
being fought out. Chivalry, " that eighth sac- 
rament," incorporated the divine principle of 
individualism ; the destructive principle of col- 
lectivism, that was the base of feudalism, was 
to go dow-n before that " winged " shape, even 
as the dragon writhes beneath the feet of 
St. George. 

Chivalry, in its turn, having served its end, 
was, later, to meet its first downthrow at Agin- 
court. Henry V., the English King, had seen 
the shield of France lowered. With the imbe- 
cility of its " wandering " King Charles IV., and 
with dissensions at home, the foreigner saw the 
right moment for striking a blow for those lost 
possessions, the very thought of whose loss 
made English Kings writhe. 

After the nobility of France had gone down 
before English Knights and Barons, came the 
turn of towns and fortresses. Falaise was 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 233 

deemed of sufficient importance to warrant 
Henry's own presence at the siege. 

Of all the twelve sieges sustained by the 
Chateau of Falaise, its attack by the English 
King Henry was the most prolonged and ter- 
rible. The town and chateau were surrounded 
on all sides by the English troops. The Duke 
of Gloucester was encamped near Guibray. 
The King himself held the heights of Mont 
Mirat. 

Hitherto the walls of Falaise had proudly 
defied catapults and their stone projectiles to 
do their worst. Now, on the Mont Mirat, a 
new enemy was to be faced. It was one before 
which, in a few after years, all walls were to 
crumble, even as the chivalry of France had 
gone down before the English troops. Can- 
non belched forth its balls of fire. And yet, 
even against this new enemy, together with all 
the older war-machinery in full force, — for 
stone projectiles of such enormous size were 
shot from catapults and balistas that it 
seemed as if nothing in town or chateau could 
survive their continuous rain — yet did Falaise 
hold out for forty-seven days. Then the worst 



2 34 FA LA IS E 

of all foes entered the town and took posses- 
sion. Gaunt-eyed famine imprinted its grim 
horror on every Falaisian face. And then it 
was, — with weak and tottering step, its town 
a ruin, its fair churches a wreck, its walls the 
very mockery of defence, and its chateau so 
battered as to be almost a shell, that Falaise 
capitulated. 

John Talbot, named Governor of the Castle, 
rebuilt the castle, its walls, and added the 
beautiful tower that bears his name. 

Exactly thirty-three years after, Charles VII., 
Joan of Arc's pale, wan King, turned to man 
and soldier by her girl courage, re-conquered 
Falaise, as he did the rest of Normandy. 



V 

This last conquest of Falaise was its final 
rivetino^ to that rich chain of united French 
provinces which formed the glorious parure of 
subsequent French Kings. Once the hated 
English out of France, and the true welding of 
the kingdom was possible. Her laws, her 
ofovernment were oro;anized. In lieu of mer- 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 235 

cenaries, of soldiers of fortune, or of noblemen 
in pursuit of gain or pleasure, the beginnings 
of a standing army startled Europe. The 
" French Chivalry," became the " Gendarmerie 
Fran9aise " and " francs archers " the national 
infantry. Cannon was perfected. France, in 
a word was ready for the strong hand of Louis 
XI. 

In the subsequent amazing strides taken by 
France in the next one hundred and fifty years, 
Falaise was no laggard. A passive, rather 
than an active force, she nevertheless added 
her quota to this evolution of the national 
character which was to produce the men of the 
Renaissance. 

The very last of her Norman Dukes had 
given her the charter of her liberty. Her 
rights and guarantees were the first things 
fought for in all future articles of peace or 
treaties of capitulation. The first of her French 
Kings to make her for evermore a true French 
town gave her the right, at Guibray, to build 
the city of the Fair. For the hundred and fifty 
years after Charles VII. had granted to Gui- 
bray " its Halls and Booths," not a single year 



236 FALAISE 

had to be wasted ; in that long interval of 
peace, Falaise and her suburb were busy in 
making themselves as famous as producers and 
merchants, as they had made Europe ring in 
earlier days with the fame of their sieges and 
courage. 

To the crude tanneries of the days of earlier 
Norman occupation, Falaise in the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries had added no less than 
two hundred different trades in and about her 
immediate neighborhood. In some of these 
industries she was considered unrivalled. Her 
tanneries were become the best in France. 
Her cutlery and cloths were also renowned. 
Her Fair, yearly, brought half of mercantile 
Europe to prove her supremacy in certain 
lines by the high prices commanded for her 
productions. With her famous fortress en- 
tirely restored; her Talbot Tower intact; her 
walls and great gatew^ays rebuilt, and her 
commerce and Fair in high prosperity, Falaise, 
during the reigns of her later Valois Kings, 
was in full flower of success. 

Its last siege, therefore, did the town the 
greater credit. The citizens, though grown 



THE CHATEAU DE FA LAIS E 237 

rich, had not lost, in the piping times of peace, 
that noble courage and strength of principle 
which wealth so often steals away. Luther, 
Calvin, Loyola — here were rallying cries new 
to ears whose o^randsires were never wearied 
of repeating William the Conqueror's great 
oath, " Par la splendeur de Dieu." Falaisians 
vowed that no Protestant King, with his 
hated English mercenaries — the help Eliz- 
abeth had sent and for which Henry IV. had 
waited before attacking Falaise — should ever 
rule over Falaise. Their convictions were as 
strong as they believed their walls to be once 
more unconquerable. There had been fight- 
ino[ between Catholics and Huo-uenots before 
this final appearance of the " King of Navarre." 
De Brissac and the Huguenot Montgomery had 
had a test of strength of arms and walls in 
proof of their conflicting religious views con- 
cerning popes and the priesthood. De Brissac 
had won and still held the fortress. 

When the white plume of Navarre appeared 
before the ramparts, followed by the long line 
of French noblemen and Elizabeth's despised 
troopers, De Brissac's rage against the hated 



238 FALAISE 

heretic flamed higher than ever. Henry 
quietly took up his headquarters with the 
Mayor of Falaise. Then he summoned De 
Brissac to render up the castle. The Count 
insolently replied that " he really could not, in 
conscience, since he had sworn not to do so on 
the Holy Ghost." Also, that for further ex- 
planation he would wait six months. 

" Ventre Saint-gris ! " was the hot-headed 
Kin2:'s oath to that answer. " I '11 oive him 
absolution of his oath — I will change the 
months into days!" Thereupon he planted 
his cannon on the neio^hborinor heio;hts. A 
breech was soon made in the Tour de la Reine. 
Henry's soldiers made the easier climb and 
ascent along the walls, as the pond, the walls' 
chief defence outwards, was frozen over. 
Henry's command was to " push forward." 
The troops were soon in command of the 
chateau — the inner living palace. The ruin 
made of the fortress by the artillery had 
turned to cowards the hiding garrison. 
Henry's troopers found no warriors to fight. 
At the town's gateway, however, a brilliant 
resistance was encountered. Here the towns- 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 239 

people, armed and hot with hate, fought Hke 
demons. 

Two notable acts of heroism aureole this last 
of the Falaisian sieges with the crown of heroic 
martyrdom. Two young lovers fought side 
by side at this battle at the gate. The young 
man fell, mortally wounded. With redoubled 
fury the lovely Falaisian girl fought across 
her betrothed's dead body. The conquerors, 
touched by so great a courage, tried to save 
her. But she yielded only to the conqueror, 
Death. As the fatal ball struck her, she 
smiled as she reeled, flinging herself, with her 
last convulsive strength, across the dead body 
of him she loved. 

At another of the gates, meanwhile, the 
King himself had been witness of as great an 
act of bravery. A woman, single-handed, had 
kept the King's troops from entering, by roll- 
ing down upon them enormous stones. This 
woman was thought to be a man, until it was 
discovered the helmet and armor covered a 
woman's weaker frame. When led before the 
King, the interview between a woman like 
" La Grande Eperonniere " and " Le Roi Vert 



240 FALAISE 

et Galant " was characteristic, " Why do you 
crush my troops, since I am your Master?" 
" Were I your subject I should defend you. 
You are my prince's enemy, I must defend 
him ! " (The phantom Prince de Bourbon had 
been designated as Henry's rival to the crown.) 

'' Roy ale Militaire — thou art right. I par- 
don thee. What dost thou wish granted 
thee } " " That my street be exempt from 
pillage." " So be it." The news of the grace 
granted L'Eperonniere flew from street to 
street. In four hours' time — the time granted 
for the closing of the street — all the portable 
wealth of Falaise, its old and young, its loveli- 
est women, and its wounded and crippled, were 
securely locked within the street du Camp- 
ferme. The rest of the town and its rich 
suburbs were then sfiven over to the lawless 
plunder of pitiless English hands and French 
greed. 

Nicolas de Sassier, however, by his clever, 
courageous act was soon making the King 
that famous appeal for the restitution of the 
Guibray Fair, which concession would be the 
means, in an incredibly short time, of replen- 



THE CHATEAU DE FALAISE 24 1 

ishing the empty Normandy chests and town 
exchequer. 

The last act, before the fall of the curtain on 
Falaise's demolished fortress and her levelled 
walls, was a curious one. In the Chateau de la 
Courbonnet, the Mayor's Castle, the King sat 
him down to write a letter. It was to his love, 
Gabrielle d'Estrees. In it he tells her his 
movements during the last month : 

" My soul, since the going of Lyceran I have taken 
the towns of Seez, Argentan, and Falaise, where I 
caught De Brissac and all he had gathered about 
him of help for Norinandie. To-morrow I leave to 
attack Lisieux. . . . My troops have grown since the 
departure of Lyceran to nearly six hundred nobles 
and ten thousand infantry; so that by God's grace I 
no longer fear anything from the Ligue. I made in 
a night what I did not think to make in Normandie 
in a year." 

" In Falaise this 8th of January. 

'' P. S. — In finishing this letter, those from Bayeux 
have brought me the keys, which is a very good 
town." 

The true drama of the fortress opened with 
the loves of Robert and Arlette. The last act 
closes upon the ruined chateau and this writ- 

t6 



242 FALAISE 

ing of a strangely laconic love-letter of her 
conqueror to his " amie." Between the two 
events there had rolled the ever-swelling move- 
ment of Normandy's advance toward peace 
and unity. For thus it is that humanity 
pushes onw^ard, making the pettier dramas of 
the Dukes and Kings of a day forgotten inci- 
dents in that mightier movement of universal 
progress. 




Street View. Falaise. 



CHAPTER VII 

FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 
I 

TO be French anywhere, is to be vividly, 
responsively ahve. Falaise, with its mod- 
ernized streets ; with its contented provincial 
traffic ; in its prosperous if somewhat mature 
aspect of peaceful calm, confirms you in 
your conviction — - should you chance to know 
French provinces — that in a country so 
thoroughly vitalized as is France, there are 
no dead places. Falaise holds up her head 
once more ; she has bound up her wounds ; 
she has nursed herself back to life and health ; 
she now presents herself to you in the almost 
ideal aspect of a robust, still brilliantly colored 
old age. 

You will find her attraction deeper than 
any glitter of mere brilliancy. She possesses, 
in a pre-eminent degree, the subtler persuasion 



246 FALAISE 

of charm. Day by day, as you lose the count 
of days or time in the study of her changeful, 
expressive features, rich in contrasts, exquisite 
in their delicate insinuations of all the life 
lived to form such outlines, you find her power 
gaining upon you. The charm will begin to 
work its spell as you wander from church to 
church ; it beckons you onward, to follow 
among the lovely confusion of terraces, gar- 
dens, and narrow lanes until you find for your- 
self the maidens still going to the fountain in 
the Valdante ; in wanton coquetry, it lures you 
to climb the heights of Mont Mirat; and it will 
not rest, nor let you, until, after showing you 
the state of its fine chateau and broad ances- 
tral acres, your capture is completed, once it 
snares you beneath the cool and shade of its 
tree-domed ramparts, close to the shadow of its 
great white fortress. 

II 

The churches of Falaise, you will find, are 
as varied in their presentment of architectural 
features, as has been their history. For an 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 247 

appreciative enjoyment, indeed, of the ecclesi- 
astical architecture of Falaise a certain knowl- 
edge of its history is essential. There are few 
places where one can carry from house to 
house, or from church to church, the scenes in 
history with so little fear of the shock of dis- 
illusion as at Falaise. Nature is here the first 
and most loyal of allies. What man has 
wholly, or in part destroyed, nature, with an 
almost tropical exuberance, has restored and 
beautified. 

In the first walk I shall ask you to take, to 
see the oldest of all the churches at Falaise, 
you will find nature so altogether enthralling, 
that the church at the end of the walk will 
take a merely secondary place. Out from the 
Place St. Gervais, you turn from the modern- 
named street Victor Hugo, down the more 
ancient Rue de Brebisson, to what remains of 
the noble tenth-century gateway, La Porte le 
Comte. This gate was the first to sustain 
attack in case of an assault upon the castle 
from this side. Unaided, relying upon its 
stout bastions and high towers, the formidable 
gate repulsed and held at bay many an army, 



248 



FA LA IS E 



its deeds of prowess second only to those that 
aureole the chateau's history. Its destruction 
dates from the latter end of the last cen- 
tury. Its archway was found too low for the 

passage of loaded 
haycarts. The 
feeling of irrita- 
tion at such 
vandalism was 
still strong upon 
me, as I felt the 
cool breezes of 
the Valdante. 

The quick pre- 
cipitation from 
the life and 
t h i c k 1 y - b u i 1 1 
streets of Falaise 
to the lap of 
the charming valley, was detectable to both eye 
and nostril. As I climbed the low hillside, the 
houses nestino; in their odorous s^ardens were 
in conspiracy to make the pursuit of old stones, 
built into lines of beauty, seem a waste of 
vision. For there was the glitter of the tiny 




A House in the Valley. 




The Norman Chnrch of St. Laurent. 



FA LA IS E OF OUR OWN TIME 25 I 

river, sparkling through waxen peach-blossoms, 
and there was a brighter lustre still in the eyes 
of the girl who, beneath the snows of an apple- 
tree, was holding a swathed babe, as if stand- 
ing as a model for a Virgin and cJiild. 




The Corniche o/D'Aubigny. 



The lovely little edifice that suddenly con- 
fronted me was amazingly in keeping with 
that picture beneath the apple-blossoms. The 
building was of no great height, yet it gives 
one the impression of an immense dignity. 
Its flight of twenty-three steps lent it the pose 
of a statue well placed upon a suitable pedes- 



252 FALAISE 

tal. In the midst of the flowery frame of 
shrubs and verdure, this old chapel of St. 
Laurent, set high upon its rock, recalled those 
still older Eastern temples built in the heart of 
woods or gardens. 

This venerable Norman chapel is so genuine 
an antique that age has ceased to produce its 
effect ; some centuries ago, weather, the sun, 
and frost had each had their turn in softening 
certain features and roughening others. The 
last effect produced, is one of a most delightful 
harmony — in gray. The rude and simple 
Norman front, with its two tiny, Gothic upper 
windows, as after thoughts, are unified by the 
grayish tone of the fa9ade. In spite of the 
inevitable restorations and whitewashing, dis- 
figuring processes, there is a convincing sim- 
plicity in the Norman nave, in the old walls 
with their herring-bone masonry, — the best of 
all signs of their true age, — and in the primi- 
tive buttresses and deeply recessed windows. 
St. Laurent is indeed no architectural impostor. 
Its very chimes have the accent of venerable 
age. As they ring along the valley, there falls 
upon the air a village sabbatical calm ; the 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 253 

worn silvery bell-notes seem to be telling you 
the secret of their longevity. 

Ill 

To be close to the Valdante, and not to 
make the tourists' devout pilgrimage to Ar- 
lette's fountain would have been an incredible 
folly. Equally foolish did it seem to leave a 
view, whichever way one walked, that grew in 
beauty and glory. So magnificent in breadth 
and extent w^as the prospect, as I drew the 
closer to the Chateau de Mesnilriant, that 
there seemed no effusions of enthusiasm left 
for merely historical sites. 

To drop downwards from intercourse with 
sunlit clouds into the heart of a mediaeval vil- 
lage, was one of those contrasts we Americans 
count on as the reward of our journeys. I 
think, if the truth were told, we also count 
upon a certain amount of suffering from the 
smell and dirt, rarely inseparable from such 
well-authenticated middle-age streets and 
methods of sewerage. These sufferings are 
something to which everyone will listen, in 



254 



FALAISE 



sympathetic disgust, when effusions over archi- 
tecture or views fall on deaf ears. 

In the Valdante, you will have the middle 
ages in your teeth. It is impossible to believe 

either houses, 
or customs, of 
smells, have 
changed in some 
hundreds of 
years. The walk 
into the valley, 
should you take 
it from the 
bridge over the 
moat, just be- 
neath the glisten- 
ing fa9ades of the 
Chateau de La 
Butte, will be a 
composite assemblage of the old and the new\ 
The thickly built hillside to your left, will 
present to you as remarkable a collection of 
old houses, gardens, and terraces crowned by 
brown walls, out of which grow trees, and 
here-and-there the great curves of a bastion 




Valdante and Porte des Cordeliers. 



FA LAIS E OF OUR OWN TIME 255 

— as you may hope to see this, the French 
side, of the Alps. There was an Italian color- 
ing, and something also of that close family 
intimacy in both houses and inhabitants, in 
the little street that, quite suddenly, running at 
right angles across the lane, I found to be the 
chief Valdante thoroughfare. 

In this narrow thoroughfare there were no 
sidewalks. The low houses were close to the 
street; centuries old they looked and were — 
these quaint crooked little houses. There were 
stone seats, w'orn into hollows, outside of many 
of the houses ; there were deeply recessed win- 
dows, small and narrow, to which glass had 
come as a surprise ; there were lunettes, still 
unglazed ; and wide doors, nearly as wide as 
the stone huts, through which cows and hay- 
carts, for generations, have passed. To the 
left, as I followed the road, there was the glitter 
and the ripple of the tiny rivulet that has 
played such a great part in history. Nothing 
more friendly and companionable could be im- 
ao;ined than the river and the road. Together 
they twisted and turned, the one between ferns, 
grassy banks, and bits of garden stretches, while 



256 FALAISE 

the latter carried its antique collections of 
houses along with the comfortable wandering- 
gait of a country lane. 

Here, as everywhere else in Falaise, the 
spring had come as the most generous of deco- 
rators. All the Valdante was in bloom and 
blossom. From every window-ledge there was 
the glow of the deep-eyed pansy, or roses in 
thick clusters, or the splendid pallor of the 
lilies we call Easter. Gardens there were close 
to the river, about some of the richer ivy-grown 
fourteenth and fifteenth century houses ; the 
hillside above was one vast garden indeed, 
where the lilacs splashed their white and purple 
sprays over the yellow broom, and stately chest- 
nuts carried their red and white blossoms as if 
each were a heavy candelabra. 

The old women who were warming their 
bones in the sun, along the river, were the color 
of shrivelled mummies against this May bloom. 
A young mother, hushing her babe's querulous 
cries, seemed, rather, to have borrowed the 
glow of the springtime. Everywhere urchins 
and children were romping and playing. The 
Valdante was as noisy as a school-house play- 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 259 

ground. Above all other sounds rose the buzz 
and whirr of the cotton-spinners. Not a house 
but had its whirring figure mounted on the 
round of the circular spinning machines. The 
men's faces looked out, across their window 
gardens, through tired eyes, as they swayed 
their lean, ceaselessly-moving figures about 
their half-knit jerseys on the frames. Old 
women, also, were spinning; their wheels were 
brought close to the door. This older, antique 
method left no sting of compassion. " Que 
voulez-vous, Madame ? " one of them answered, 
as I stopped for a moment of talk. " In one's 
youth — quand on est jeime — one scorns such 
old-fashioned trades. But when one is old — 
without eyes to see well, or fingers to move 
easily, or legs to walk, the wheel is a good 
friend." I left her, feeling the richer for the 
old woman's philosophic content in her toil. 

Arlette's fountain at last ! 

It was only a deep wide hole in the wall, as 
commonplace a well as one could imagine. A 
look upwards, however, and the commonplace 
ended. The chateau was rising up aloft with an 
immense majesty, it was true ; but the castle was 



26o FALAISE 

also astoundingly neighborly — there was no 
question of that. It was almost impossible, I 
should say, to conceive of a grim feudal fortress 
being on a friendlier footing with a humble 



A Chateau in Town 

valley, that is, the Chateau of Falaise with the 
Valdante. In its fiercer, warlike moods, a bow^- 
man of even average skill with the bow could 
have lodged his arrow here below where he 
willed. Why might not a lover's eye have 
covered the distance ? 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 26 1 

As if to make the historic flight backwards 
the less arduous, across the little river was a 
tannery. Its colors still stained the bank and 
tinted the running stream as they have through 
so many a century. The odor of the bark 
was thick upon the air. A tall strong figure 
emerged from the tannery, the man's reddened 
arms and stained boots the color of dried 
blood. Neither the scarlet arms nor the 
deeply dyed apron affrighted the child, a 
girl, who, with blond curls streaming in the 
wind, ran forward to the scarlet arms opened 
wide to receive her. " Papa ! Papa ! " cried 
the childish voice, in its lisping liquid French, 
" Viens — the soup is on ! " 

I cannot tell just why I found the homely 
scene at once touching and re-assuring. Ver- 
pray, Arlette — Robert — those historic per- 
sonages were no longer remote, phantasmal ; 
they were you and I, the child yonder and 
its stalwart father, all of us who repeat, genera- 
tion after generation, the same old, the ever- 
young, eternal round of human love and 
human toil. 



262 FALAISE 



IV 



In making the further tour of the churches 
of Falaise, one is confronted with the most 
eloquent of all proofs of the vicissitudes of the 
town's history. There is not in all the town 
a single sacred edifice that can be called 
entirely Norman. William, the master-genius, 
and Odo, his great ecclesiastical half-brother, 
builder of Bayeux and designer of the famous 
Bayeux tapestry, left at Falaise no worthy 
monument of their building era. William's 
sagacity was hurtful to his birthplace. His 
intuitive instinct, with true Viking prophetic 
vision, foresaw the future importance of Caen. 
There, w^here large rivers ran, close to the sea, 
great cities grew. He built, therefore, his two 
Abbeys at Caen. 

Falaise's natural advantages had determined 
her role. She would be and would continue to 
be, a magnificent cliff-fortress. As a town, 
she would play a secondary part in the history 
of her time. Such was William's view. 

The chapels, therefore, that grew, under the 
pressure of the eleventh century's new-born 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 263 

passion of building, into churches, were all 
parochial churches. They never aspired to 
become cathedrals. 

The oldest of all the churches in town is, to 
be entirely accurate, just out of it. That leg- 
endary investigating goat that summoned, by 
its cries, the gallo- Romans who then owned 
Guibray, to view its discovery of the statue of the 
Virgin, was its true founder. The chapel, re- 
built later by Mathilda of Flanders, was the Nor- 
man successor to that primitive shrine. The 
fine choir and rounded apse which were beau- 
tiful examples of a still later Norman, are now 
encased in the so-called embellishments of the 
eighteenth century. It is needless to add, these 
attempts have resulted in disaster. The older 
noble Norman choir has entirely disappeared. 
Instead, there is a meaningless circular recess, 
at the top of which are two huge unsightly win- 
dows, the whole supported by shallow pilasters. 

The strength and simplicity of the Norman 
nave, the rough primitive transepts, and the 
noble Norman door with its rich carvings, are, 
however, expressive examples of the great Nor- 
man period. 



264 FALAISE 

This church is intimately associated with 
two early queens, both of whom lived much at 
Falaise. Mathilda's pride in the church, at 
whose dedication she and her husband both 
assisted, must have been at its height when 
this new church of Guibray, in common with 
all the other churches of Falaise was given, 
with all its tithes and rights of burial, to the 
church of churches for Mathilda, her own 
Abbey aux Dames at Caen. The ladies of the 
abbey held all the livings and revenues of 
these churches until the Revolution. 

The dim features of Berenice, that romantic 
bride Richard of the Lion Heart married in 
Sicily, illuded and yet pursued me, as I walked 
beneath the Norman arches. 

A far more vivid, human, and admirable 
memory was a half-hour spent in the presby- 
tery of Notre Dame de Guibray. The- flutter 
of a priest's robe at the gray door of the high 
garden wall reminded me I had, so to speak, a 
friend at Court. In an incredibly short time 
I was made at home in the presbytery. The 
cure, his mother, and young sister, and my 
genial friend the Abbe, all lived together in a 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 265 

charming seventeenth-century stone house. 
The presence of the dignified rnere gave a note 
to the home life one rarely associates with a 
priestly interior. It was not alone the house 
I must see, but the garden, where, day after 
day, winter and summer, the two priests did 
their walking as they said the office of 
the hour or talked over their parochial 
duties. It was a pleasing picture I carried 
away with me, — this of the two stalwart 
priests, with their intelligent, expressive Nor- 
man features, set in the frame of their sunny, 
blossoming garden ; and also of that and 
many other stirring chats about churches, 
Falaisian history, and the men of old and 
modern times. 

V 

One feels the Square of Saint Gervais, at the 
end of the Rue Argentan, to be the heart of 
the town. Long, irregular streets grow out of 
this centre of the mild provincial stir and 
traffic. In spite of the obviously modernized 
houses, the Square, in the language of the 
studio, composes well. It possesses the first 



266 



FALAISE 



essential of the paintable quality : its lines are 
irregular, yet harmonious. It presents also 
a great variety of perspectives rich in color- 
schemes. The Rue des Cordeliers ends in the 

brown bastions 
and the outer 
rickety stairway 
that make of the 
once stout La 
Porte Ogier a 
favorite play- 
house for the 
children of the 
neighborhood. 

The chief or- 
nament of the 
Square is the 
rich Norman- 
Gothic Church 
of Saint Gervais. Its beautiful Norman tower 
rises above the modernized house-fronts, with 
the dignity of an older, lordlier day. For cen- 
turies, however, so far from the building stand- 
ing as one apart from the humble houses about 
it, the church had taken shops and meaner 




Apse of Saint Gervais^ Falaise. 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 269 

dwellings to its bosom, so to speak. These 
incrustations were still disfiguring the sacred 
edifice when I last saw it. The restorations 
now going on have in view, however, the re- 
moval of these unsightly reminders of the 
walled town. 

The earliest beginnings of Saint Gervais were 
in that Chapelle Diicale which was said to have 
faced the house — le Manoir de Guillaume, 
in which Arlette, his mother, and Verpray, his 
grandsire, Hved. Freeman will tell you Wil- 
liam was born in this house on or near the 
Square. Nevertheless, to those who prefer the 
more picturesque theory of the Conqueror's 
first cradle having been in the narrow castle 
chamber, for such there is the circumstantial 
proof that the babe was baptized in the 
Church of St. Trinity, the parish church of 
the chateau. 

It is significant of William's interest in this 
part of the town close to his house — or to 
that of his mother's — that he should have 
given the ducal chapel to the town. As the 
town, however, in these earlier feudal days pos- 
sessed no communal rights, the Duke reserved 



270 FALAISE 

to himself and his heirs all seigneurial privileges. 
The chapel was immediately rebuilt into what 
must have been the noble Norman structure 
Henry I. saw consecrated in 11 34. Of this 
edifice we have remaining the fine central 
tower and one entire side of the nave with its 
side chapels. The other side of the nave is 
Gothic. The effect of such an astounding 
mixture of styles in close juxtaposition is, of 
course, fatal to unity and harmony. For those 
essential elements of beauty one must turn to 
the exterior. The late Gothic and Renaissance 
of the choir, with the richly crochetted flying 
buttresses, pinnacles, and the elaborately carved 
parapet, form an architectural ensemble of great 
distinction. 

For an effective contrast in ornament, I 
know few churches offering so many interest- 
ing examples as Saint Gervais. The rude, 
grotesque figures and distorted features of the 
eleventh century, in the capitals of columns in 
the Norman nave, face the refined traceries of 
the Gothic. Rough demoniacal gargoyles grin 
and leer at the serpentine curves of beautifully 
carved salamanders on its exterior. 



FA LAIS E OF OUR OWN TIME 27 1 

Some further pleasing relics of antiquity are 
to be found in the side chapels of the Norman 
nave. To associate pleasure with a review of 
tombal effigies and armorial frescos may seem 
a curious taste ; yet there survives in us all 
something of that old ancestor- worship which 
delights in any record of the dead. In the 
little side-chapels of Saint Gervais are black 
bands encircling the shafts of columns; on these 
bands the arms of the D'Aubignys and other 
famous Norman names shine in dimmed heraldic 
splendor. In the tombs beneath one's feet 
the figures in outline, costumed in rigid quaint 
garb, are those of Norman Knights and their 
ladies. 

Of the Square as Henry IV., as Fran9ois I., 
as Charles X. saw it, there is little left, save the 
Church, of the Place that was the first to wel- 
come its Kings with the pomp and splendor 
that made the royal entries of Falaise famous. 

The " whispering neighbors " of the many 
gabled windows in the narrower, less modern- 
ized streets, will lead you toward that part of 
the town that grew up about the fortress. On 
your way thither, you will stop to look across 



272 FA LA IS E 

to the swimming heights of Mont Bezet framed 
in the door of the old gateway — one of two 
still standing — now known by the name of 
Les Cordeliers. Its older name of La Porte d' 



The Chateau of Versainville 7iear Falaise. 

Ogier le Danois has a far greater significance 
for modern ears. 

A part of the gardens of William the Con- 
queror's " manoir " were given to the convent 
of Les Freres Mineurs, known as Les Corde- 
liers. In time the gateway took the name of 
the brothers. 

The monumental state of some of the older 
house-walls and fa9ades recalls the many 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 273 

abbeys and convents which here, as at Caen, 
Bayeux, and Rouen, must have made those 
mediaeval towns seem one vast conventual 
city, interspersed by a few churches, dwellings 
and chateaux. Falaise, from its earliest Nor- 
man days, was a very devout Catholic indeed. 
Its cowled monks and hooded sisters were 
even more numerous a body than were, in 
times of peace, its soldiers. Hospitals, con- 
vents, a home for lepers, — with these and the 
numerous abbeys was the town crowded. 

At the other end of the town, overlooking 
the Valdante, you still may see the left wing of 
the ancient House of the Templars. The first 
appearance of these " Chevaliers of the Tem- 
ple " at Falaise, was in 1170. When the over- 
rich templars were sent to their dreadful death 
in 1309, their estates were divided — their Fal- 
aisian property sinking later to the level of a 
printing-house. 

In the quiet Square of Guillaume-le-Con- 
querant you may still see some of the state of 
the seventeenth and eighteenth-century town. 
As if brandishing his successes in the teeth of 
this Falaise of the Bourbons, the Duke Wil- 



2 74 FALAISE 

Ham, astride a huge stallion, in theatrical pose, 
waves aloft in the centre of this Square, his 
knights' banner. This equestrian statue, with 
the six Dukes of Normandy, in their mantles 
and armor, guarding the lower pedestal, seems 
to fill the tranquil Place as with a noisy pres- 
ence. The figure of the Duke belongs to that 
period of French sculpture when frenzied ac- 
tion was mistaken for the subtler principle of 
rendering movement through repose in which 
action is suggested rather than tumultuously 
expressed. 

The true jewel of this Square is the Church of 
Sainte Trinite. A beautiful triangular chapel 
fronts on the Square. One enters through a 
charming porch in full Renaissance bloom. 
AlthouQ^h there are earlier Gothic features in 
the church, the structure, as a whole, recalls that 
florid style Hector Sohier made so popular. 
There are portions of Sainte Trinite that are like 
the fragments of a palace. The richly deco- 
rated Renaissance porch is one such fragment ; 
another is that portion of the choir beneath 
which is tunnelled the enchanting passage-way 
leading from one old street to another. The 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 



275 



magnificent Renaissance buttress, with its 
carved pinnacle, close to this vaulted passage- 
way, is a monument in itself. 

The character of the Place Gulllaume Le 
Conquerant is distinctly eighteenth- 
century — as is indeed 
much of the town still 
left, after the vandalism 
of the last hundred 
years. For the 
Falaise up to 
the time of 
the Revolu- 
tion was still 
a wonderful 
little town. 
Its streets 
were then 
lined with 
richly carved gabled houses ; its six noble gate- 
ways were then still standing. To realize the 
immense style such gatew-ays give to a town 
one must go nowadays as far as Bordeaux. 
The fortress was then in ruins. The w^alls, 
however, both about the chateaux and the 




Sainte Trinite, Choir and Apse. 



276 FA LA IS E 

town, were almost intact, with many of the 
turrets and towers in perfect condition. The 
old moats already had been converted into 
the smiling gardens and orchards that grow 
beneath our feet, as we stand, nowadays, on the 
bridges that cross them. The innumerable 
sixteenth and seventeenth-century chateaux, 
that still give their note of stately distinc- 
tion to Falaise, were then at their very prime 
of luxury and grandeur. The convents and 
abbeys in and about the town were also in full 
enjoyment of their privileges and prosperity. 

When Falaise, therefore, saw fit to offer a 
King its homage, it had the means at hand 
of presenting that homage wdth magnificent 
state. The royal entry offered to Charles X., 
when, as Comte d'Artois, he passed through 
the town, is recorded as one of unusual splen- 
dor. Churches were decked in banners and 
rich cloths. The triumphal arches were as 
numerous as they were gorgeous in color. 
The town had robed herself in superb cloths 
and stuffs of her own weaving. To the proces- 
sions that went forth to meet the future King, 
the Seigneurs lent a state no cortege of Repub- 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 



277 



lican France now commands. The coaches 
were the coaches of fairies, as decked with 
plumes as a duchess's bed. The gold and 
silver-wrought vestments that glittered on the 




The Church of Samte Trinite. 



backs of priests and archbishops would bring 
fabulous prices to-day in the antiquity shops. 
To the splendor of ecclesiastical and court 
ceremonial was added the richness of robes 
worn by judicial and civic authorities; and 
the very crowds that lined the streets, in their 
gay and picturesque costumes, made a blaze 



278 FALAISE 

of color unknown in our more practical, less 
poetic age. 

For Napoleon the Great, Falaise, in the 
exuberance of its admiration for this new con- 
queror, had prepared its best welcome. The 
chateaux of the neighborhood, forgetting their 
hate, were generous enough to remember only 
the gracious laws of hospitality. Napoleon 
was to be the guest at the Chateau de la 
Fresnay. The town had prepared a triumph 
as elaborate as it was to be costly. But between 
the courtesies of the Valois and the Bourbons, 
and the brutal indifference of the great Corsican, 
there lay the great dividing line which has 
marked the distinction of the Old Res^ime and 
the newer order of no manners and a great 
haste. 

Napoleon found no time for the eating even 
of the elaborate banquet spread for him at the 
chateau ; and still less for the nonsense of a 
" royal entry " in a remote little town. The 
naive Falaisians sent to proffer him the town's 
welcome, in song, beneath the chateau win- 
dows, received a characteristic Napoleonic 
treatment. " Oil peut-on etre mieux qu'au 



FALAISE OF OUR OWN TIME 279 

sein de sa famille ? " the beloved national 
air, was sung to ears that even in gayer mo- 
ments had no taste for music. The touching 
suggestion to the idyl of peace to be enjoyed 
in the family circle, was perhaps unfortunate. 
Napoleon had as much use for the joys of 
either the family or the national bosom as he 
had for peace. The singing Falaisians were 
" bidden to stop." As they, in their innocent 
ignorance of the new order of things brutal, 
still continued. Napoleon yelled out to his 
guards, "Do your duty!" It is recorded of 
the unfortunate musicians " that they retired in 
great confusion." The town had only the debts 
of the royal entry that never came off, to pay 
in souvenir of this disgraceful action of the 
" sovereign of the people." 

Little wonder they " danced gayly " when 
the Bourbons came in, dancing in the squares, 
in the streets, and in the suburbs. For three 
long months their songs and shouts of joy 
succeeded the groans and tears Napoleon's 
cruel wars had wrung from almost every Falai- 
sian home. As in the first delirium of the 
freedom promised by the Revolution, Falaise 



28o FALAISE 

then had given herself up, in common with all 
France, to the excesses of the age of reason, 
so in this restoration of her ancient Kings, 
she celebrated her rapture with the ardor and 
intensity characteristic of her nature. 

In Republican France, the Carmagnole in 
the open streets has been superseded by balls 
given by the Mayor to the People, in Town 
Halls. 

Yonder, across the ramparts, as we peer 
below into the peaceful vale where browsing 
sheep and sleek cattle have succeeded the 
swans that floated, in times of peace, in moat, 
and pond, we seem to see, as through a mist, 
that host of men that have fought, during the 
long centuries, the battles that have made the 
People free. 



THE END 



Jtt anil 0\xt of. 

"Cliree jBtormantig 3fnn0 

BY ANNA BOWMAN DODD 

NeTV edition, <with numerous full-page plate and other illustrations* 



t2mo* Cloth, extra* Price, $2*00, 



t2mo* Paper^ <with frontispiece* 50 cents 



(©pinion^ on €f)rce |[5ormantip 3^^^ 

The reader who lays down this book without wishing there were more of it 
is to be pitied. ... It is rarely that so thoroughly delightful a bit of travel and 
study is discovered. These sketches of Normandy coast scenes, people, and 
inns, are really quite ideally good. The author has done good work before, but 
nothing so good as this. . . . The inns so capitally treated are at Villerville, 
Dives, and Mont St. Michel, and it is hard to say which of them is the most 
fascinating. — JVeiu York Tribune. 

Charming alike in matter and literary style. She has the eye of an artist 
for the picturesque, and the art of presenting her impressions in pure and grace- 
ful English. Nothing could be more charming than the description of Villerville 
in the opening chapters. It literally " breathes of the sea " and of the fisher-folk 
who have their homes within the quaint old village. — Saji Francisco Call. 

No one, we fancy, will be able to close this enticing volume without a desire 
to cross the sea and follow in the footsteps of its author, from Villerville to 
Dives, from Dives to Caen, thence to Coutance, and finally to the summit of the 
cathedral-crowned Mont St. Michel. . . . She has the art of making pictures 
for her readers which pulsate with real atmosphere and glow with veritable 
color. There is quick apprehension, close observation, a keen sense of the 
comical — and there is also, here and there, a delicate touch of feeling. — 
Literary World. 



LITTLE, BROWN, & COMPANY, Publishers 

254 Washington Street, Boston, Mass* 



[ovi:r.] 



In truth, we must say this author has fine adaptiveness (anybody can bolt, 
but few discriminate), and the literary quality of her '-' Three Normandy Inns" 
is of the best. It deserves distinguishing consideration, and will add to the 
reputation ah'eady won among readers of her delightful " Cathedral Days." — 
JVe7V York Times. 

Il is long since a more vivacious and thoroughly charming volume of 
travels has appeared. Old as the theme is, and familiar as the ground is, Mrs. 
Dodd has given to her narrative an individuality and a freshness that are 
delightful. — Book Bicyer. 

Gives the reader a curious insight into the customs and life in this province 
of Northern France which has been so idealized by the artists. The author has 
a dainty touch ; she sees all that is picturesque in this land overshadowed by its 
stirring history. — San Francisco Chronicle, 

It is charmingly and humorously written, with a keen insight into the char- 
acter of the sturdy, vigorous coast people. — Richmond Despatch. 

Agreeably vivacious and well written. But it is of the sea-encircled Mont 
St. Michel that the author writes best — how well, only those who have visited 
the abbey, and, above all, partaken of the wonderful omelettes of Mme. Poulard 
c an kn o \<i . — Ph ih x delph ia Press. 

The writer is a keen observer of men and things, and, described by her magic 
pen, the most commonplace scenes and incidents become as attractive reading 
as the most exciting novel. — 0/naha Bee. 

As the beautiful country always presents some novel features, so does the 
clever book, with its " ins and outs," give you a fresher appreciativeness, 
" Three Normandy Inns " is a book apart. This was to be expected of the 
author of " Cathedral Days." One might tire a little of painters' slang, some- 
times of their ways, but not so when the Unknown, and Charm, her friend, and 
John Renard, and M. Paul, and Madame the Countess talk and tell, as in this 
volume, of what they saw, and give you their impressions. You are no longer 
driving in the hot sun, along monotonous roads, or plodding along sea beaches ; 
you are face to face with the unexpected. . . . 

When the strategic William was preparing for his descent, and England 
and Harfleur were to be overcome, on the great waters of the Dives, he 
built his boats, and there stood on the spot for centuries an inn, formerly a 
manor-house, and le Sieur de Semilly, who quartered the arms of Savoy on his 
escutcheon, held the place. Here it was that that lively lady, Mme. de Sevigne, 
with a gallant company, stopped some centuries ago. With infinite grace, and 
in touch with the period, Anna Bowman Dodd describes that visit. The con- 
clusion of the scene is as neatly done as if a de Goncourt had written it. — New 
York Tit7ies. 



LITTLE, BROWN, & COMPANY, Publishers 

254 Washington Street, Boston, Mass* 



Catftttrral 5iag£( 



A TOUR IN 
SOUTHERN ENGLAND 

By ANNA BOWMAN DODD 

New edition. Illustrated with Sketches 
and Photographs by E. Eldon Deane. 
l2mo. Cloth, extra. Price^ $1-50 



Opinions on (^ati&ttrral Hags 

A fresh and ever readable author. — Neiv York Tribune. 

Irving and Hawthorne seem to us the only travellers in England who have 
shown such keen insight into the spirit of English life as she does. — Chicago 
Inter-Ocean. 

It is no small compliment to say that in its new dress ... it deserves a 
reception as warm as the first. The cathedrals visited are Salisbury, Wells, 
Exeter, Chichester, an4 Winchester, and the illustrations include pictures of all 
of them, but the real value of the book comes from the author's keen eye for 
small details of manners, dress, and bearing, speech and voice, necessary for the 
perfection of an imagined picture of a foreign land. — Neiv York Times. 

There is a freshness, grace, and humor about this description of a tour in 
Southern England that make every step a pleasure and many scenes a delight. — ■ 
North American, Philadelphia. 

Uncommonly interesting. — Buffalo Express. 

Mrs. Dodd's work remains unique in our list of travel-books, and its pic- 
tures of the English countryside remain in mind long after the book has been 
laid aside. A word of commendation should be expressed for the handsome 
dress given the book in paper, binding and illustrations. — Art Interchange. 

There is a careful setting forth of facts, historical and otherwise, sand- 
wiched between personal experiences obtained in an unconventional and alto- 
gether unguide-book manner, and the combination is irresistible. — Chicago 
E'vening Post. 

The author's eye is quick and her hand is sure, whether surrounded by the 
stately magnificence of a bishop's palace or the loveliness of lonely roads and 
sunny riversides. The charm is not alone of the subject, but of the fancy 
which brightens the colors of every view. The personal interest is well man- 
aged, and the little happenings of the way, often mirthful and sometimes 
provoking, are never given a word too much. — San Francisco Argonaut. 



(!^piuious on (tatf^ttival USags 

A real addition to the brief list of books that give zest to a tourist. . 
They hire a T-cart 5 a horse, christened " Ballad," with whom they and we are 
soon on terms of choice acquaintanceship j and proceed with light belongings 
over an ideal route, stopping at ivied country inns, when and where they choose, 
subject to nothing but the weather and their own will. Their tour begins at 
Arundel in Sussex, and ends at Exeter in Devon, a journey of six enchanted 
weeks, — a blended succession of rural villages, towns, heaths ( Stonehenge and 
Bath taken in by the way), manor-houses, castles, and beyond and over all the 
sacred and inspiring Cathedrals of Chichester, Winchester, Salisbur)-, Wells, anc 
Exeter. — Edmund C. Stedman, in the Book Buyer. 

How one can imprison so much English sunshine and fragrance, and trans- 
mute it into style, and spread it out on the printed page, as our American saun- 
terer in England has done, is one of the secrets of authorship. — T/ie Critic. 

Here are English inns, and buxom landladies and romantic ones, with the 
queer waiters, and lusty talk of English yeomen, and the chatter of English 
lasses, and their songs, and the mysteries of the old houses, and you make 
journeyings along flowery lanes and dusty highroads, and you climb up breezy 
hills, and then all at once the glory of Winchester or Wells or Glastonbury or 
Exeter bursts on you. — Neiu Tork Times. 

Mrs. Dodd's leisurely happy ride in her carriage from one South of Eng- 
land cathedral to another made the perfect atmosphere for a summer book. Her 
recital is perfect in style and matter. — E'vaugelist. 

Nothing half so charming in its way as Mrs. Dodd's "Cathedral Days" 
has appeared since Robert Louis Stevenson told us of his ''Inland Voyage." 
. . . We can no more describe its flavor than we could describe the flavor of a 
fruit. Each man must read it for himself 5 and indeed it ought to be read by all 
who enjoy the spell of good literature. Nobody who takes it up will be willing 
to put it down until he has absorbed the whole of it, from preface to finis. — 
Neiu York Commercial Advertiser. 

Their horse, whom they christened " Ballad," was no unimportant member 
of the expedition ^ and his eccentricities and weaknesses, his difliculties in getting 
down hill and his reluctances in getting up, are depicted with a good deal of 
humor. — Literary World. 

The book is not only what it purports to be ['vide preface), " the adven- 
tures that befell us on our charming journey," but it is just the book for one to 
take as a guide among the cathedral towns of southern England, Arundel, 
Chichester, Winchester, Rowley, Salisbury, Wells, Stonehenge, Glastonbury, 
and Exeter. What suggestions come from simply reading such a list of names ! 

Horace P. Chandler, in Boston Advertiser. 

Mrs. Dodd has a charming subject, and she has treated it with taste and 
sympathy. The tour which she describes was made with her husband in a one- 
horse T-cart which they drove themselves 5 and they spent about two months, 
in fine summer weather, journeying about southern England, which is one of the 
loveliest countries in the world. — Netv Tork Tribune. 



n/y 



